jt.

“Not theirs,” Barbara said.

Steph, still halfway through climbing in the window because doors were for people with less dramatic branding, paused with one boot on the sill. “Okay. Love that we’re opening with reassurance. Mildly hate that it was necessary.”

Barbara’s mouth twitched.

You were sitting cross-legged on the floor beside a civilian who looked like he had been recently introduced to the concept of surviving something and had not yet decided whether he was grateful. His hands shook around a paper cup of water. His face was grey beneath the bruises, eyes fixed on nothing. You sat near him, close enough to be present but not close enough to trap him with care.

Steph noticed that first.

You did not touch him. You only held your own hands open on your knees, palms up, like an invitation he was free to ignore.

“You’re safe here,” you said quietly. “Nobody’s asking you to be okay. We’re just getting through the next minute.”

The man’s breath hitched.

Steph slipped the rest of the way inside, closing the window behind her with a soft click. Her cape caught on the latch because, naturally, the universe loved comedy.

Barbara glanced at her. “Spoiler.”

Steph tugged her cape free with the dignity of a woman who had absolutely not lost a fight with architecture. “Oracle.”

The man startled at her voice, and Steph immediately froze.

You looked up. Your eyes met hers.

You smiled, not brightly, not politely, but with the kind of calm that made room instead of demanding attention. “Purple vigilante in the corner is friendly,” you told the man. “Mostly.”

Steph pointed at herself. “Mostly?”

“You came through a window.”

“That’s a fair note.”

The man’s mouth twitched. It was tiny. Barely there. But in the room’s tense silence, it landed like a miracle had cleared its throat.

You turned back to him, your smile softening. “There you go. Still here.”

Something shifted then.

Steph did not have Duke’s powers. She could not see light bending around you or warmth moving through the air. She could not read emotional fields, not in any supernatural way. But she had spent her life learning rooms the hard way. She knew the sound of a mood changing because someone dangerous had gone quiet. She knew the tiny release of breath when a threat passed. She knew what it looked like when fear loosened one finger at a time from someone’s throat.

The man’s shoulders lowered. His hands stopped shaking quite so badly. The Clocktower itself seemed to exhale.

You, however, went pale.

Just a little. Not enough for most people to notice.

Barbara noticed. Steph noticed Barbara noticing. And because Steph Brown had never once seen a mystery and thought, Let’s respect boundaries and mind our business, she immediately decided you were interesting.

The man eventually drank his water. Barbara arranged a safe transport. You stood only after he left, and the moment you were upright, you swayed.

Steph moved without thinking.

You caught yourself on the back of Barbara’s chair before she reached you.

“I’m fine,” you said.

Steph stared at you. Barbara stared at you. Even the computers seemed unconvinced.

“That was a very poor room to say that in,” Barbara said.

You sighed. “I am aware.”

Steph leaned one hip against the desk, folding her arms. “So. Are you always this dramatic after floor therapy, or was tonight special?”

You looked at her. “Floor therapy?”

“You were on the floor. You therapied. I’m workshopping the terminology.”

Barbara closed her eyes briefly. “Please don’t.”

“No, let her cook,” you said.

Steph brightened. “Thank you, mysterious blood-sleeve person.”

“I have a name.”

“I’m sure you do. But mysterious blood-sleeve person has flair.”

You gave her your name. Steph repeated it, testing the sound of it, and something in her chest did a stupid little flip because apparently she was a person who could develop a crush between sarcasm and crisis response. 

Barbara turned one screen toward Steph. “They’re consulting with me on civilian emotional stabilisation after the Narrows incident.”

“Ooh,” Steph said. “Official.”

“Unofficially,” you added, “I help people breathe when Gotham gets too Gotham.”

Steph looked at the blood on your sleeve, the exhaustion around your mouth, the glitter still stuck near your cheekbone like a tiny rebellious star. “And the glitter?”

You reached up, touched your cheek, and looked genuinely betrayed by your own fingers when glitter came away. “Children’s grief group made cards earlier.”

“Ah. Occupational hazard.”

“The glitter has unionised.”

Steph grinned. “Respect.”

You smiled back.

That was the beginning. Not the real beginning, maybe. Stories always had roots buried earlier than anyone wanted to admit. Yours had begun long before Steph, in whatever lonely place had shaped your power. Hers had begun in a house where love arrived inconsistently and danger had a familiar voice. But the beginning that mattered between you happened in the Clocktower, under blue computer light, with Barbara pretending not to watch both of you realised you were going to become a problem for each other.

Steph decided she liked you by the end of the week. She decided this with the solemnity she brought to most major life choices, which was to say she announced it while upside down on Barbara’s couch, eating fries she had not technically been offered.

“I like them,” she said.

Barbara did not look away from her screens. “I gathered.”

Steph narrowed her eyes from her inverted position. “That was a suspiciously quick gather.”

“You have mentioned them sixteen times in forty-eight hours.”

“Seventeen if you count this one.”

“I do.”

“Rude.”

Barbara’s mouth curved. “Accurate.”

Steph stole another fry. “They’re funny.”

“They are.”

“And nice.”

“Yes.”

“And weird.”

“This is Gotham.”

“Good weird,” Steph said. “Like emotionally competent weird. Which, in this family, is basically a metahuman ability.”

Barbara’s typing paused.

Steph rolled her head to look at her. Barbara’s expression had gone carefully neutral.

Steph sat up so fast she nearly choked on a fry. “Wait. Was that a joke, or did I just accidentally trip over classified information?”

Barbara turned her chair slightly. “They have powers.”

Steph blinked. Then, because she was Steph, she pointed a fry accusingly at Barbara. “You were just going to let me walk around making jokes without knowing there was lore?”

“It is not my information to tell casually.”

“But you’re telling me now.”

“Because you are going to keep asking questions until you either figure it out by endangering yourself or annoy me into a migraine.”

“That sounds like trust.”

“That sounds like pattern recognition.”

“Same thing if you’re fun about it.”

Barbara gave her a look. Steph ate the fry.

Barbara explained, carefully. Comfort. Emotional regulation. Panic reduction. Fear softened. Rage eased. Grief made survivable for the next few minutes. Not mind control. Not forced happiness. Not obedience. The power worked best when someone consented or when immediate danger made intervention necessary. You were strict about that. Barbara was stricter.

Steph listened.

She listened harder than she let her face show. Because she could joke about wizard lawsuits and emotional support cryptids all she wanted, but something inside her had gone very still.

Comfort as a power. Being able to make hurt smaller. Being able to reach into the room and say, no, not gone, but bearable.

Steph thought of all the nights she had laughed too loudly because silence was too close to crying. Thought of bruises hidden under purple fabric. Thought of doctors and stitches and being told she was reckless, too much, not enough, wrong shape for the symbol, wrong girl for the job. Thought of all the times she had wanted someone to make the room gentler without asking her to explain why it hurt.

“That’s…” Steph trailed off.

Barbara looked at her over the rim of her glasses. “Yes.”

“I was going to say neat.”

“No, you weren’t.”

“Maybe I was.”

“You were not.”

Steph picked at the edge of the fry carton. “Does it hurt them?”

Barbara’s expression changed.

Not enough for most people. Enough for Steph.

“They say it makes them tired,” Barbara said.

“That is a deeply suspicious sentence.”

“I know.”

“Have you asked?”

“Yes.”

“And?”

“They are very good at making other people feel safe. Less good at believing they are allowed to be cared for in return.”

Steph stared at the Clocktower floor.

“Oh,” she said.

“Yes.”

Steph did not make a joke.

That was how Barbara knew it had landed.

After that, you became part of Steph’s life in the way glitter became part of carpet. Suddenly, permanently, and impossible to fully explain to visitors.

You worked with Oracle on crisis calls and field aftermath. When Scarecrow toxin hit a subway station, you sat with survivors while Steph helped secure the platform. When a hostage situation ended with thirteen civilians shaking in the back room of a pharmacy, you guided them through breathing while Steph stood guard at the door, pretending she was not listening to every word. When a villain’s sonic weapon caused panic attacks across three blocks, you and Barbara built a response system in real time while Steph ran messages and cracked jokes into comms until a crying teenager laughed hard enough to breathe.

You were good at what you did. Annoyingly good.

Steph watched you ask permission like it mattered every time.

“Can I sit beside you?”

“Can I help the panic get smaller?”

“You can say no.”

“I’ll stop if you ask.”

People said yes more often than not. Some said no. You respected both answers, which did something complicated to Steph’s chest.

She started bringing you snacks.

This was not flirting, according to Steph. This was logistics. You forgot to eat after long calls, and Steph believed in solving problems through aggressive convenience-store offerings. Granola bars. Waffles. Juice boxes stolen from the kid-friendly section of the Clocktower supplies. Once, a bag of sour gummy worms and a bottle of water placed in front of you with the seriousness of a medical intervention.

You looked down at them. “Am I being threatened?”

“Hydrated,” Steph said. “Violently.”

“You brought candy.”

“For morale.”

“Whose?”

“Mine, if you refuse.”

You smiled and opened the gummy worms.

Steph felt victorious for reasons that had nothing to do with nutrition.

In return, you learned Steph’s tells.

That was less funny.

You learned that she joked faster when she was hurting. That her grin got wider when she felt left out. That she said “I’m good” in a higher pitch when she was actively not good. That she got meaner about herself in casual little asides, like if she made the insult first, no one else could land it harder.

You noticed too much. Steph noticed you noticing. This led, naturally, to conflict disguised as banter.

“You’re doing the sad eyes,” Steph said one night, sitting on the Clocktower floor while you cleaned a cut along her cheekbone.

“I am not.”

“You are. You look like a wounded deer with a counselling qualification.”

“You are bleeding on Barbara’s rug.”

“Deflection.”

“That is my line.”

“I stole it. I am a criminal.”

“You are a vigilante.”

“Vigilante with hobbies.”

You dabbed antiseptic onto the cut.

Steph hissed. “Betrayal.”

“You got punched by a man in a moth costume.”

“Do not disrespect Killer Moth’s cousin.”

“He called himself Murder Moth.”

“See? Branding is hard. We should support local artists.”

You laughed despite yourself. Steph grinned, then winced.

Your hand paused near her face, not touching the cut now, just hovering.

Something in the air softened.

Steph’s breath eased. She did not know why. Not then. She only knew that being near you made the pain feel less like proof she had done something wrong by existing loudly. Near you, she could hurt without turning it into a performance. Near you, she could be funny because she wanted to be, not because she had to outrun the pity.

She thought that was friendship.

And it was. That was the problem.

You liked Stephanie Brown. You liked her in a way that was not neat enough to file under friendship, not safe enough to pretend was only admiration, not casual enough to ignore when she smiled at you like the world had just become a little less disappointing. You liked her purple glitter nail polish, her chipped-tooth smile, her refusal to let despair have the last word. You liked the way she could walk into a room full of grieving people and make no attempt to make grief noble. She handed it waffles and called it trash.

You liked how fiercely she defended people who were used to being dismissed. You liked how she said, “Yeah, that sucked,” with more healing in it than some people managed with entire speeches. You liked how she saw your exhaustion and tried to feed it, mock it, sit next to it, threaten it with carbohydrates.

That was why you started making mistakes.

Small ones. Soft ones. The kind that looked like kindness until held under bright enough light.

Steph came in after patrol one night, shaking too hard to remove her own gloves. She was laughing when she climbed through the Clocktower window, breathless and bright, telling Barbara about how she had “absolutely meant” to fall through that skylight because surprise entry was a valid tactic and gravity was just jealous.

Then she turned toward you, and you saw her hands.

Not the blood. There was blood, yes, but not much.

The tremor. Her fingers flexed once. Twice. Like she was trying to convince her own body it was still under her command.

“What happened?” you asked.

Steph waved one hand. “Skylight. Gravity. Villain with a taser. Long story. Hilarious in retrospect.”

Barbara’s eyes sharpened. “Were you electrocuted?”

“Electrocuted is such a dramatic word.”

“Spoiler.”

“Lightly introduced to voltage.”

You reached for the medkit.

Steph kept talking. Faster now. Brighter. Your power reacted to the panic beneath the words before you gave it permission.

You should have asked. You knew that. You always knew that.

But Steph was smiling too hard, and Barbara was busy pulling up medical protocols, and the tremor in Steph’s hands was getting worse. You told yourself it was only the edge. Only enough to stop the panic from turning into something that would make her feel embarrassed later. Only enough that she could breathe.

Warmth moved quietly from you.

No visible glow. No dramatic pulse. Just the room easing by degrees.

Steph’s shoulders lowered. Her hands steadied. Her laugh became less sharp and more real.

“See?” she said. “Totally fine.”

You smiled back.

The guilt arrived late.

That was the first time. There were others.

Not many, you told yourself. Not enough to matter. Not targeted, not heavy, not controlling. You did not change her choices. You did not make her happy. You did not make her like you. You only softened the worst of the panic when it clawed too high behind her ribs. You only helped her sleep in the Clocktower after missions where she had nearly died and refused to call them traumatic because trauma was apparently for people without purple branding. You only let comfort sit in the room when her jokes got too bright and her hands too cold.

It was easy to justify because Steph looked better afterwards. It was unforgivable for the same reason.

Barbara almost caught you once. Or perhaps she did catch you and chose to issue a warning disguised as a conversation, which was very Barbara and therefore worse.

You were alone in the Clocktower kitchen, washing mugs after Steph had fallen asleep on the couch with a waffle-print blanket pulled over her shoulders. Barbara rolled in silently, which should not have been possible and yet absolutely was.

“She trusts you,” Barbara said.

Your hands stilled in the sink. You stared at the soap bubbles.

“I know.”

Barbara’s voice remained even. “Do you?”

You closed your eyes. The water ran too hot over your fingers.

“I’m not trying to hurt her.”

“I know.”

“I’m not making her do anything.”

“I know.”

“She was panicking.”

Barbara said nothing.

You shut off the tap. The silence that followed was worse than a lecture.

Finally, Barbara said, “You of all people understand the difference between helping and deciding.”

It would have been kinder if she had raised her voice.

You nodded.

“I’ll tell her,” you said.

Barbara looked at you for a long moment.

“Tell her soon,” she said.

You meant to.

That was the ugliest part. You meant to every time Steph sat beside you on the Clocktower roof eating waffles from a paper plate and complaining about Bruce’s inability to text like a human person. You meant to when she painted your nails purple and gold after a long night because “your hands look like they’re auditioning for Victorian ghost.” You meant to when she started texting you pictures of ugly pigeons, badly parked cars, and herself making increasingly stupid faces in patrol mirrors. You meant to when you realised your heart lifted every time she called you Care Bear.

You meant to.

Then Steph would smile at you like you were the one place she did not have to defend being too much, and cowardice would settle softly over your tongue.

The villain called himself The Mirror. This was, according to Steph, “deeply pretentious and probably a theatre kid red flag,” but the name stuck because Gotham criminals had a way of committing to aesthetics even when the aesthetics deserved jail time.

His power, or technology, or some miserable combination of both, fed on shame. Not fear. Not despair. Shame. He trapped people in their worst self-beliefs and reflected them back until they could not see anything else. Victims were found standing in front of broken windows, dark screens, puddles, anything reflective, whispering apologies to people who were not there.

A city like Gotham produced more than enough fuel.

The first major attack hit a probation office. The second hit a school. The third hit a shelter for families of incarcerated criminals.

That one made Steph quiet. Too quiet.

You found her in the Clocktower after the briefing, sitting on the floor beneath Barbara’s main screens, knees drawn up, arms loose around them. She had not changed out of the Spoiler suit, though her mask was pushed up into her hair. Purple eyeshadow smudged beneath one eye. Her mouth was set in a line that looked like it wanted to be a joke and could not find the strength.

You sat beside her.

“I hate this guy,” she said.

“Yeah.”

“No, like, normal amounts because he’s a villain, but also personal amounts because he’s rude.”

“Shame-based attacks are rude.”

“Exactly.” She leaned her head back against the wall. “Like, get a hobby that isn’t emotionally waterboarding people with their daddy issues.”

You glanced at her. She stared straight ahead.

There it was. The door cracked open half an inch.

You did not reach for it.

“Do you want to talk about it?” you asked.

Steph laughed. “Absolutely not.”

“Okay.”

She turned her head toward you, suspicious. “That’s it?”

“That’s it.”

“No follow-up emotional crowbar?”

“I left it at home.”

“Sloppy.”

“I know. Very unprofessional.”

Her smile flickered.

Then faded.

“My dad used to make everything my fault,” she said suddenly.

You went still.

Steph kept looking at the screens. “Not always directly. Sometimes directly. But mostly, like, the vibe. If I was upset, I was dramatic. If I was scared, I was weak. If I was angry, I was ungrateful. If I tried to stop him, I was stupid. If I didn’t stop him, I was useless.” She swallowed. “Villain families. Great childhood enrichment.”

Your chest hurt.

“I’m sorry,” you said.

“Yeah.” She picked at a scuff on her glove. “Anyway, I hate shame guy.”

You wanted to comfort her so badly your hands ached. Instead, you said, “I hate him too.”

Steph looked at you then. Something softened.

“Good,” she said. “Hating together is a bonding activity.”

“I’ll add it to our friendship scrapbook.”

“We have a scrapbook?”

“No.”

“We should.”

“You want a scrapbook of hatred?”

“Obviously.”

You smiled. She smiled back.

No power. Just the two of you sitting beneath Oracle’s screens with old pain in the room and no one trying to make it vanish.

That should have taught you better.

The final attack happened at the shelter for families affected by villain crime. It was exactly the sort of place The Mirror would choose because he had taste in cruelty: a converted old church with a daycare room in the basement, counselling offices upstairs, folding chairs in the hall, donated coats on racks, and walls covered in children’s drawings that tried very hard to make the world look kinder than it was.

You had worked there before.

Steph had avoided it before. Not because she did not care. Because she cared too much and had no idea where to put that care without letting it become grief.

The call came during a thunderstorm. Dramatic, of course. Gotham loved nothing more than timing trauma to weather.

By the time you and Steph arrived, half the building was caught in The Mirror’s field. Windows had gone black and reflective. People stood frozen in hallways, staring into glass, eyes wide and wet. A woman whispered, “I should have known,” over and over. A teenage boy clawed at his own sleeves. Somewhere below, children were crying.

Steph stopped at the threshold.

You felt it hit her.

Not your power. The villain’s.

Shame moved through the building like cold ink, searching for cracks in everyone it touched. It found Steph immediately because shame knew her shape. Knew the old wounds. Knew the voice of a father who made love conditional and blame hereditary. Knew Bruce’s disappointment, real or imagined. Knew every time she had been told she was not ready, not good enough, not supposed to be there.

Steph’s grin appeared. Too bright.

“Well,” she said, voice sharp, “this place could use better lighting and fewer trauma mirrors.”

You looked at her. “Steph.”

“Don’t do the voice.”

“What voice?”

“The ‘I see through your hilarious defence mechanisms’ voice. Very rude. Very accurate. Still rude.”

Oracle’s voice crackled in comms. “Spoiler, status.”

Steph pressed two fingers to her comm. “Inside the world’s worst self-esteem seminar. Ten out of ten on theme, minus several million for consent.”

“Can you proceed?”

Steph looked toward the basement stairs where a child screamed. Her face changed.

“Yeah,” she said. “Proceeding.”

You moved together.

For a while, it worked. Steph broke mirrors with purple batarangs and a level of enthusiasm that suggested personal satisfaction. You moved from victim to victim, asking when you could, offering when words were gone. Warmth flowed from you in controlled pulses, giving people enough space inside the shame to look away from their reflections. Steph kept the path clear, cracking jokes that should not have worked and did anyway.

“Hey,” she told a man sobbing into a blackened window. “I know the evil mirror seems convincing, but have you considered that men who monologue through glass are usually compensating?”

The man blinked.

You touched his hand after he nodded, and his breathing steadied.

Steph gave you a thumbs-up. You smiled.

The field grew stronger near the basement.

Children’s drawings lined the stairwell. Crayon families. Houses. Dogs with too many legs. A purple stick figure labelled SPOILR in wobbly letters. Steph saw it and went still for half a second.

You saw her see it.

Then, The Mirror spoke through every reflective surface at once.

“Stephanie Brown.”

Steph froze.

The voice was wrong. Smooth, echoing, almost kind. You hated it immediately.

“Oh, ew,” Steph said, but her voice shook. “Full government name. Someone’s desperate.”

The blackened glass in a picture frame shifted.

Arthur Brown’s face looked out. Not real. Not alive. Not even a good illusion, technically. But shame did not need accuracy when it had memory. Steph’s father stared from the frame with a smile that made your skin crawl.

“There she is,” he said. “Still playing hero.”

Steph’s hand tightened around a batarang.

You stepped closer. “It’s not him.”

“I know,” she said.

But knowing and feeling were rarely the same thing.

The image smiled wider. “Still ruining everything you touch?”

Steph threw the batarang.

The frame shattered. Every piece of glass on the stairwell reflected him.

The Mirror’s voice came through them all. “Still too loud. Still too reckless. Still trying to prove someone made a mistake when they told you to stop.”

Steph’s breath hitched.

You felt the shame clamp around her like a hand.

You reached for your power.

Stopped.

Ask. You had to ask.

“Steph,” you said. “Do you want help?”

She laughed, too high. “With my evil daddy mirror problem? No, I’m good, thanks.”

“Steph.”

“I said I’m good.”

The field surged.

Steph staggered. Below you, a child screamed again. The sound changed everything.

Steph’s head snapped toward the basement. The shame still had her. You could feel it dragging at every old wound, every insecurity, every fear that she was not enough and never had been. She raised one hand toward the wall to steady herself and nearly touched a shard of reflective glass.

If she looked too long, she would freeze like the others.

“Steph,” you said again.

Her eyes flicked to you. They were wet and furious.

“Don’t,” she whispered.

You did not know if she meant do not pity me, do not see me, do not use it, do not let the kids hear me break, or all of the above.

Then a small voice sobbed from below, “Spoiler?”

Steph’s face crumpled.

She moved.

Not because she was not hurting. Because someone needed her.

She pushed past you and down the stairs.

You followed.

The basement daycare was worse. The Mirror had turned the old wall-mounted television into a black reflective surface. Children sat huddled beneath tables and behind overturned chairs, crying while the screen whispered in voices that sounded like parents, teachers, bullies, older siblings, themselves. A volunteer stood frozen in the centre of the room, staring at her reflection and mouthing, “I failed them.”

At the far end, The Mirror stood in person. He was taller than you expected. Thin, pale, dressed in a dark suit threaded with reflective panels that caught every bit of light and turned it cold. His face was covered by a smooth silver mask.

“Ah,” he said. “The joke.”

Steph stepped in front of you. Even shaking, even hurt, even with shame clawing at her throat, she still stepped in front of you.

“Ah,” she shot back. “The loser.”

The Mirror tilted his head. “Do you know why you laugh first, Stephanie?”

“Oh, good, villain therapy. My favourite.”

“Because you are afraid someone else will.”

Steph’s smile faltered.

You felt the room lurch.

The children cried harder. Your power rose in response, desperate.

The Mirror looked at you. “And you. The comforter. The soft hand over the bruise. How noble.”

You moved toward the children.

His mask followed. “Tell me, do they know how often you touch their pain before they ask?”

Your blood went cold.

Steph turned slightly. Just enough.

Not enough to fully look at you.

Enough.

The Mirror laughed softly. “No? Secrets among heroes. How familiar.”

“Shut up,” you said.

Steph’s eyes remained forward.

“What is he talking about?” she asked.

The room seemed to narrow.

You had imagined telling her in the Clocktower kitchen. On the roof with waffles. During some quiet hour where your apology could sit between you without children crying and a villain wearing shame like cologne.

Not here. Not now.

But secrets always picked their own cruel timing.

“I’ll tell you after,” you said.

Steph laughed once. It sounded nothing like her.

The Mirror lifted one hand toward the television.

The children screamed. The shame field spiked hard enough to buckle your knees. Steph made a broken sound and nearly went down. The volunteer in the centre of the room lifted both hands toward her own throat as if trying to claw out a voice only she could hear.

There was no time.

You opened yourself.

The power burst from you in a wave. Not gentle. Not subtle. Not the tiny secret warmth you had used on Steph after patrol. This was all of it, thrown wide into the basement, into the children, the volunteer, the villain’s victims upstairs, into Steph.

Especially Steph.

You felt her shame hit your warmth and stutter.

Her breathing steadied. Her hand stopped shaking. The field around her softened before she gave permission.

Steph went very, very still.

The Mirror staggered back as the children broke free of the reflections. The volunteer collapsed to her knees, sobbing. Steph moved on instinct, hurling a batarang at the television, shattering the screen in a spray of black glass. You kept the warmth pouring out, holding everyone steady, keeping shame from reattaching, keeping the room survivable.

Steph tackled The Mirror.

It was not elegant. It was deeply personal.

She hit him hard enough to knock the silver mask loose and pinned him to the ground with one knee in his back.

“Here’s the thing,” she said, voice too calm, too even because your power still held the worst of her emotion down. “I make the jokes about me. Not creepy chrome theatre boys. That’s my bit.”

The Mirror wheezed.

Steph zip-tied his wrists with vicious efficiency.

Then she looked back at you.

The warmth was still in the room. Still in her.

Her face changed.

Not with realisation alone.

Recognition.

“All those times,” she said.

Your chest cracked open. “Steph—”

“No.” Her voice was soft. Horribly soft. “That feeling. After patrol. In the Clocktower. When I thought I was calming down.”

You could not answer. That was answer enough.

A child sniffled nearby.

Steph looked at the children, then at the unconscious villain, then at you. Her anger tried to rise, and your power, still active, softened it before it could sharpen.

Horror crossed her face.

“Oh my God,” she whispered. “You’re doing it now.”

You pulled back immediately. Too fast.

The room lurched. Children whimpered as the last hooks of shame scraped at them. You forced the warmth outward again, away from Steph this time, toward the civilians only, but the basement was too small and the field too tangled. Steph felt the edge of it. You saw her feel it.

Her eyes filled with tears. “You’re making me not mad.”

“I’m trying to keep the kids safe.”

“That’s not what I said.”

“I know.”

“Stop doing that.”

“I can’t yet.”

The words landed like a betrayal inside a betrayal.

Steph stared at you as if you had slapped her.

You kept your power around the children until Oracle’s evacuation team arrived, until Nightwing and Orphan cleared the upstairs rooms, until the last victim was guided outside into the storm-wet street and away from every reflective surface. Only when the basement was empty except for you, Steph, and The Mirror unconscious on the floor did you let the power die.

The cold hit immediately.

Your knees buckled.

Steph moved toward you before she could stop herself.

Then stopped.

You caught yourself on a table instead.

Good, you thought miserably. She should not have to catch you.

Steph stared at you, face pale, eyes wet, mouth twisted like she was trying to hold back six different reactions and hated all of them.

“How long?” she asked.

The question sounded exactly like fear wearing anger because anger had better shoes.

You swallowed. “Steph—”

“How long?”

You looked down.

Her laugh cracked. “Wow. Okay. That’s an answer.”

“It wasn’t every time.”

“Oh, cool. Good. Great. Love the clarification that you only secretly emotionally adjusted me sometimes.”

You flinched.

She saw it and looked angrier.

“Don’t do that,” she said.

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t do that either.”

You closed your mouth.

Steph paced once, then spun back toward you. “I thought you got it.”

“I do.”

“No.” Her voice rose, then broke. “No, you don’t get to say that. You don’t get to be the person who knew I was joking because I was hurt and then use magic emotional bubble wrap on me because you decided I needed it.”

“It’s not magic.”

“I do not care about the genre right now.”

The words would have made you laugh on any other night. Tonight, they only hurt.

“You should have asked,” she said.

“I know.”

“You should have told me.”

“I know.”

“You let me think I was safe with you.”

“You were.”

Steph’s face crumpled.

“No,” she said, and the smallness of it hurt worse than shouting. “No, I wasn’t. Not from you.”

Your eyes burned.

“I thought you were the one person who didn’t treat me like I needed editing,” she said.

The sentence killed whatever defence might have still existed in you.

You gripped the edge of the table.

Steph wiped at her face angrily. “Do you know how many people have looked at me and seen a problem to fix? My dad. Bruce. Half this stupid family on their worst days. Teachers. Cops. Villains. Everyone who thought I was too loud, too reckless, too emotional, too stupid to know what I was doing.” Her voice shook. “And then there was you.”

You could barely breathe.

“You laughed at my jokes,” she said. “You didn’t make me feel dumb. You let me be too much. Or I thought you did.”

“I did,” you whispered.

“Then why were you revising me in secret?”

There it was. The line that opened the floor beneath you.

You had no answer that made you less wrong.

The storm tapped against the small basement windows. Upstairs, boots moved, voices called, sirens approached. The Mirror groaned faintly on the floor. Steph kicked him lightly in the ankle without looking, and he went quiet.

“I wanted to help,” you said, because it was the truth and not enough.

Steph laughed again. “Everyone does. That’s usually where they start making choices for me.”

“I know.”

“Stop saying that!”

You flinched.

Steph’s face twisted immediately with regret, but she did not apologise.

Good. You did not deserve to be protected from her anger.

“You’re right,” you said. “I knew better. That’s what makes it worse.”

She stared at you.

You forced yourself to keep going. “I know what consent means. I ask people every day. I built rules around it because I know comfort without choice can become control. And then with you, I told myself it was small. That you were panicking. That it helped. That I wasn’t changing you, just making it easier for you to breathe. I made it sound kind because I cared about you.”

Steph’s eyes shone.

“That doesn’t make it okay,” you said.

“No,” she whispered. “It really doesn’t.”

“I’m sorry,” you said. “Not because you found out. Because I did it.”

Her face went very still.

Then she nodded once.

Not forgiveness.

Acknowledgment.

That was more than you deserved.

Nightwing appeared at the top of the stairs. “Everything okay down there?”

Steph did not look away from you. “No.”

Dick’s expression changed.

You looked down.

Steph took a breath. “But the civilians are clear, and reflective boy band villain is zip-tied.”

“Okay,” Dick said gently. “Medical?”

You could feel him looking at you.

You hated that you needed it.

“I’m fine,” you said.

Steph laughed, cold and sharp. “Oh, absolutely not. We are not doing that too.”

You shut your mouth.

Dick descended a few steps. “Can you walk?”

You pushed away from the table. Your legs nearly failed.

Steph moved again. Stopped again.

Dick came the rest of the way down and caught your elbow.

You did not look at Steph. You could not.

As Dick helped you toward the stairs, Steph stepped aside.

The space she made for you felt wider than the room.

You did not see Steph for six days. Not properly. You saw evidence of her in the Clocktower because Steph had always left evidence. A purple hair tie on the couch. A half-empty box of cereal in Barbara’s kitchen. Glitter nail polish on the desk beside your files. A sticky note on the medkit that said RESTOCK OR PERISH in aggressive bubble letters. But Steph herself became a ghost with excellent dramatic timing. She avoided every room you entered, skipped crisis calls where you were assigned, sent updates through Barbara, and once climbed out a window when you came in through the door, which felt unnecessary but honestly deserved.

You did not chase her. That was the only apology you could make with your body.

Barbara watched you not chase her.

“You look terrible,” she said on the third day.

You sat at the Clocktower table with a mug of tea you had not touched. “Thank you.”

“That was not a request for gratitude.”

“I know.”

Barbara’s expression softened, barely. “You are allowed to be sorry without punishing yourself into usefulness.”

“I am not trying to be useful.”

Barbara looked at the stack of paperwork you had completed, the restocked medkit, the colour-coded victim follow-up files, and the tray of snacks you had stress-baked for the entire Clocktower.

You sighed. “Okay.”

“She is angry,” Barbara said.

“She should be.”

“Yes.”

“I hurt her.”

“Yes.”

That one landed harder because Barbara did not soften it.

You deserved that, too.

“She also misses you,” Barbara said.

Your throat tightened.

“That does not mean she is ready to forgive you,” Barbara added.

“I know.” Barbara gave you a look. You managed a weak smile. “Sorry. I overuse that phrase now.”

“You overuse many things.”

“Fair.”

On the sixth night, Steph came back.

She entered through the window because of course she did, carrying a takeout bag in one hand and a storm cloud in her face. You were alone in the Clocktower kitchen, cleaning dishes that were already clean because your anxiety had chosen domestic haunting as its form.

Steph landed silently behind you.

You turned.

She held up the bag. “I brought waffles.”

Your chest hurt.

You set the sponge down. “Okay.”

“They’re not forgiveness waffles.”

“I understand.”

“They’re angry waffles.”

“That sounds fair.”

“Also, I got extra syrup because I’m mad, not because I remembered you like it.”

Your eyes burned. You nodded very seriously. “Of course.”

Steph looked annoyed by your emotional face, which was fair because your emotional face had no chill.

“Don’t make me regret being nutritionally aggressive,” she said.

“I won’t.”

“Good.”

She sat at the small kitchen table and began unpacking containers with unnecessarily sharp movements. Waffles. Syrup. Hash browns. Two orange juices. A tiny packet of butter that she glared at because it would not open.

You stayed by the sink.

Steph looked up. “Are you going to hover like a sad Victorian ghost, or are you going to sit?”

You sat. Not too close.

She noticed. Her mouth tightened.

For a while, neither of you spoke. Steph poured syrup over her waffles with the focus of someone preparing evidence. You picked at the corner of your napkin and tried not to look at her too much.

Finally, she said, “I’m still mad.”

“I know.”

She pointed her fork at you.

You winced. “Sorry.”

“I’m still mad,” she repeated.

You nodded. “Okay.”

“I still feel weird in my own head when I think about it.”

Your stomach twisted.

“I’m sorry,” you whispered.

“Yeah.” She cut into the waffle. “I know you are. That’s not the problem.”

You waited.

Steph stared at her plate.

“The problem is I believe you,” she said. You looked at her. She did not look up. “I believe you didn’t mean to control me. I believe you didn’t make me like you. I believe you were trying to help. And I hate that because it would be easier if you were secretly evil.”

A broken laugh slipped out of you.

Her mouth twitched, but her eyes stayed wet.

“I keep thinking about all the times I felt better around you,” she said. “And then I get mad because I don’t know which parts were me and which parts were you.”

“You,” you said, then stopped yourself.

Steph’s gaze snapped up.

You swallowed. “I want to say it was you. I believe that. But I know I don’t get to be the proof right now.”

Her expression shifted.

You looked down. “That’s the worst part. I can tell the truth now, but I made myself hard to believe.”

Steph’s fork paused halfway to her mouth.

For several seconds, she just looked at you. Then she set the fork down.

“Damn it,” she said.

You blinked. “What?”

“That was a good answer.”

“I’m sorry?”

“No, you don’t get to be emotionally self-aware while I’m trying to be righteously furious. It’s rude.”

Despite everything, you smiled faintly. Steph saw it and looked away fast.

The silence between you changed.

Not fixed. Not soft. But less like a locked door.

“I need to say stuff,” Steph said.

“Okay.”

“You don’t get to make it easier.”

“I won’t.”

“No powers.”

“No powers.”

“Even if I cry.”

Your throat tightened. “Even if you cry.”

“Even if you cry.”

You nodded. “Even if I cry.”

“Good.”

Steph took a breath.

Then she talked.

She talked about how scared she had been in the basement. About hearing her father’s voice and hating that it still had a key to some room inside her. About realising your comfort was in her body before her anger could get there. About how horrible it felt to know she wanted to be mad and could not access the full shape of it until you stopped. About how it made her think of every person who had ever told her to calm down when what they meant was be easier for me to ignore.

You listened. You did not interrupt. You cried once, silently. Steph looked at you, saw you keeping your hands folded in your lap, and kept talking.

That was the repair beginning.

Not forgiveness.

Repair. There was a difference.

When she finished, the waffles were cold.

Steph leaned back in her chair, exhausted.

You looked at your untouched plate. “I don’t know what to say that isn’t just another apology.”

“Good,” Steph said. “Because if you apologised again, I was going to throw a hash brown at you.”

You nodded. Then, after a pause, “Can I ask something?”

Steph’s eyes narrowed. “Depends.”

“The angry waffles…”

“They remain angry.”

“Right. Of course. But did you bring them because you wanted to talk, or because you wanted to make sure I ate?”

Steph looked personally offended.

“Both,” she muttered.

Your heart ached.

She pointed at you again. “Do not make that face.”

“What face?”

“The face like you’re about to cry because I’m nice. I’m not nice. I’m furious and charming.”

“You are.”

“Both things.”

“Yes.”

She picked up her fork again. “Eat your stupid waffle.”

You did. It tasted like sugar, cardboard takeout containers, and a second chance with teeth.

After that, things rebuilt slowly.

Steph did not trust you with her panic right away. That was fair. You did not trust yourself with it either.

You made rules. Not because rules fixed harm, but because they gave both of you something solid to hold while trust grew skin over the wound.

No powers on Steph without direct verbal consent unless immediate death or serious injury was unavoidable. No subtle room-softening when Steph was injured, deflecting, or joking too brightly. If you felt the urge to use your power, you had to say so instead. Steph was allowed to say no without explaining. You were allowed to say no if using your power would drain you too badly.

That last rule was Steph’s addition.

You had stared at her when she wrote it.

She had glared back. “What?”

“I didn’t expect—”

“Yeah, that’s part of the problem, Care Bear.”

You closed your mouth.

She tapped the paper with her pen. “You’re not allowed to turn consent into a one-way street where I get boundaries and you get martyrdom.”

Barbara, from across the Clocktower, said, “Excellent point.”

Steph pointed without looking. “Thank you, Oracle.”

“You’re welcome.”

You looked down at the rule until the words blurred.

You are allowed to say no.

It felt absurd. It felt impossible. It felt like something you would have to learn to deserve, even though Steph would probably throw something at you if you said that aloud.

So you did not say it. You signed the rules.

Steph signed them too, adding a tiny doodle of a waffle in the corner labelled ANGRY BUT FAIR.

Barbara laminated the page.

Neither of you asked why she had a laminator ready.

Some questions in the Batfamily were traps.

Weeks passed. You and Steph found your way back through ordinary things. That was the only way to do it. Trust did not return in a cinematic monologue. It returned in waffle runs where Steph asked before sitting too close. In Clocktower nights where you said, “I want to help, but I won’t unless you ask,” and Steph nodded, sometimes relieved, sometimes angry all over again, but always heard. In nail polish bottles lined up on Barbara’s table because Steph decided your hands looked “haunted by paperwork” and needed colour.

The first time she painted your nails again, she chose purple with gold glitter.

“You’re making me your brand,” you said.

“I’m improving your marketability.”

“I thought I wasn’t supposed to be useful.”

Steph paused.

You realised what you had said.

Her expression softened, but she kept her voice light. “Correct. You are supposed to be sparkly and emotionally inconvenient.”

“That sounds like your brand.”

“I contain multitudes.”

She held your hand between hers, brush moving carefully over your nail.

No power moved. Your hand was only a hand.

Steph knew. You could tell she knew by the way her thumb rested against your knuckle: light, present, ready to let go if needed.

You looked at her bent head, the concentration in her face, the smudge of purple polish near her thumb.

“I missed this,” you said quietly.

She did not look up.

“Yeah,” she said. “Me too.”

It was not a confession.

Not yet.

But it made space for one.

The first time Steph asked for your power properly, it was not dramatic.

No villain. No basement. No evil mirror. No children crying. Just the Clocktower at two in the morning after a bad patrol where nothing catastrophic happened except Steph saw a little girl with her father in the back of an ambulance, and the girl would not stop apologising for needing help.

Steph had gone quiet afterwards.

Not joke-quiet. Gone-quiet.

She sat on Barbara’s couch with her knees pulled up, staring at the floor. Her mask was off. Her hair was loose and tangled. One cheek was bruised purple-blue beneath the old purple of her suit.

You sat on the floor several feet away.

Not too close. Not too far.

“Do you want me to call Barbara?” you asked softly. Steph shook her head. “Do you want waffles?”

A tiny breath. Almost a laugh. “Not yet.”

“Do you want me to shut up?”

“Never thought I’d say this, but no.”

You waited.

Steph rubbed both hands over her face. “I’m mad.”

“Okay.”

“And sad.”

“Okay.”

“And I feel stupid about both.”

“You’re not.”

She looked at you.

You held up both hands. “No powers. Just an opinion.”

Her mouth twitched weakly.

Then she looked down at her hands. “Can you…”

Your breath caught.

She swallowed hard. “Can you take the edge off? Not the whole thing. I want to stay mad enough to be myself.”

Your eyes burned.

“Yes,” you said carefully. “I can do that.”

“And if I say stop?”

“I stop.”

“Immediately.”

“Immediately.”

“And you tell me what you’re doing.”

“I’ll hold your hand if you want. I’ll let a small amount of warmth move through touch. It should help your body stop bracing so hard. It won’t make you forgive anyone. It won’t make you less angry. It won’t change what you think. It just gives the feeling a little more room.”

Steph stared at you for a long moment. Then she held out her hand.

“Okay, Care Bear,” she said, voice shaking. “Try again. Correctly this time.”

You took her hand.

Your power moved softly, carefully, no more than she had asked for. Warmth passed between your palms and stopped there, waiting at the boundary of her permission. Steph’s eyes closed. Her shoulders lowered a fraction. A tear slipped down her cheek. Her mouth trembled, but her hand stayed in yours.

After a few seconds, she whispered, “Stop.”

You stopped. Immediately.

Her eyes opened.

She inhaled. Exhaled. The room remained exactly as it was: blue-lit, messy, full of cold waffles and vigilante gear and a laminated consent agreement with an angry waffle doodle on the desk.

Steph looked at your joined hands.

“That was better,” she said.

You laughed softly, tears in your eyes. “High praise.”

“I’m a generous soul.”

“You are.”

She glanced up. “Don’t get mushy.”

“I would never.”

“You absolutely would.”

“Yes.”

Her thumb brushed over your fingers once.

No power.

Just Steph.

“I still like you,” she said.

Your heart stopped behaving normally.

She looked annoyed with herself. “It’s inconvenient and frankly offensive after the whole betrayal arc, but apparently my taste is stubborn.”

You stared at her.

Steph’s cheeks flushed. “Say something before I fake my death.”

“You already did that once, didn’t you?”

Her eyes narrowed. “That’s your response?”

“I panicked.”

“Terrible. Try again.”

You squeezed her hand carefully. “I still like you too.”

Steph’s face softened.

Then she pointed at you with her free hand. “To be clear, I am still healing from the aforementioned betrayal arc.”

“I know.”

She glared.

You corrected quickly. “I understand.”

“Better.”

“I’m still sorry.”

“I know.”

You gave her a look.

She smiled, small and real. “What? I’m allowed.”

You laughed. She laughed too. And for the first time in weeks, the room did not feel like a wound being carefully avoided. It felt like something bruised but alive.

The kiss happened later.

Of course it did. Steph Brown might be many things, but emotionally efficient was not usually one of them.

It happened on the Clocktower roof after a night of rain, with Gotham spread below in wet neon and dirty silver. Barbara had kicked both of you upstairs under the pretence of “fresh air” and the very real threat of revoking snack privileges if you kept staring at each other over case files instead of “handling whatever this is.”

Barbara was terrifying. Effective, though.

Steph sat on the ledge with a box of waffles between you, boots swinging over open air. She wore a purple hoodie over her suit, hair pulled into a messy ponytail, glitter polish chipped on three fingers. You sat beside her, close enough that your shoulders almost touched.

Almost.

The city hummed below.

Steph took a bite of waffle. “Oracle has the subtlety of a brick with Wi-Fi.”

You smiled. “She cares.”

“She meddles.”

“Also true.”

Steph looked at you, then away. “You’ve been better.”

You looked down at your hands. The purple glitter polish had started chipping, too. “I’m trying.”

“I know.”

You glanced at her.

She grinned. “See? I’m allowed.”

“You’re impossible.”

“And yet, wildly charming.”

“Wildly.”

She looked pleased for half a second, then nervous. That was new. Steph nervous without covering it immediately with noise.

You waited.

She set her waffle down. “Can I ask you something?”

“Always.”

“Are you using any warm fuzzy cheating right now?”

Your chest tightened.

“No,” you said. “No powers.”

“You sure?”

“Yes.”

“Even a tiny little emotional seasoning?”

Despite yourself, you laughed. “No emotional seasoning.”

“Good.” She turned toward you fully, one knee tucked on the ledge. “Because I want to know I’m about to kiss you because I have excellent taste, not because you’re doing magic serotonin crimes.”

Your breath caught so hard it almost hurt. “You’re about to kiss me?”

Steph’s confidence flickered. “That depends on whether you’re about to say yes or make this very awkward.”

You smiled, slow and helpless. “Yes.”

Her eyes widened slightly.

You softened. “Yes, Steph. You can kiss me.”

She swallowed.

Then, because she was Steph, she pointed at you. “If you make me cry, I’m pushing you emotionally, not physically, off this roof.”

“That sounds fair.”

“Good.”

She leaned in. Slowly, for once.

The kiss was soft at first, almost cautious, which would have surprised anyone who did not know how careful Steph could be with things that mattered. Her hand rose to your cheek, hovering for half a second until you leaned into it. Then she touched you, warm fingers against your skin, and kissed you like a joke finally allowed to become a confession. You kissed her back with your hands resting on the ledge because you did not want to take anything. Not from her. Not this. Not ever again.

No power moved. Nothing softened the nerves or polished the want into something easier. It was messy and human and a little syrup-sweet because Steph had definitely been eating waffles five seconds ago.

When she pulled back, her forehead rested against yours.

“No powers?” she whispered.

“No powers.”

“Good.”

“You taste like syrup.”

“Romantic.”

“I thought so.”

She laughed, and the sound trembled at the edges.

You opened your eyes. Steph was crying.

Only a little. She looked furious about it.

“Don’t,” she warned.

“I wasn’t going to.”

“You were thinking something mushy.”

“I was thinking you’re beautiful.”

“That’s worse.”

“Sorry.”

“No, say it again later when I can pretend to hate it properly.”

You smiled.

She smiled back, wet-eyed and bright and still healing, not smaller for the hurt, not softer because you had made her that way, but present because she chose to be. Her anger had not vanished. Her trust was not unscarred. The past remained a thing with teeth. But she was there, and you were there, and the space between you held no hidden warmth.

Only the ordinary kind.

Steph picked up the waffle box and placed it between you again with grave ceremony.

“Important note,” she said.

“Yes?”

“These are not angry waffles anymore.”

“No?”

“No. These are cautiously optimistic waffles.”

You laughed so hard your eyes filled.

Steph looked proud.

“Much better branding,” you said.

“I know. Growth.”

You leaned your shoulder against hers. She let you.

After a moment, she leaned back.

Below you, Gotham kept being Gotham: sirens, wet streets, bad decisions, worse architecture, people hurting and helping and sometimes doing both in the wrong order. There would be more crises. More calls. More moments where your power rose before your permission did. More days where Steph joked too fast, and you had to choose trust over instinct. Healing did not become easy because two people kissed under a cloudy sky with waffles between them.

But it became possible. That was the thing.

Steph reached for your hand.

“Normally,” she said.

You laced your fingers through hers.

“Normally,” you promised.

She squeezed once.

No powers. No glittering emotional shortcut. No secret softening.

Just Stephanie Brown’s hand in yours, warm and real and chosen. On the roof of the Clocktower, with syrup on her mouth and bruises under her hoodie, Steph looked at the city that had tried so many times to make her feel like a mistake and smiled anyway.

You loved her for that.

You would tell her later. When she was ready. When you were brave. When the waffles were less in danger of being weaponised.

For now, she rested her head on your shoulder and said, “I’m still mad sometimes.”

“I know.”

She lifted her head just enough to glare.

You smiled. “I understand.”

“Good.”

“I still like you.”

Her glare softened into something almost shy.

“Yeah,” she said. “Me too.”

Then she settled back against you, and the city lights flickered below like broken things refusing to go dark.

That, you thought, was Steph all over.

Not fixed. Not edited. Not made easier.

Signal worked in daylight because someone had to. Because Gotham did not stop hurting people when the sun came up. Because fear did not only belong to midnight. Because children still flinched at noon.

He first saw you outside the Hilltop Community Centre on a bright, cold morning after a shooting three blocks over had turned the neighbourhood into held breath. Police tape fluttered down the street. Reporters gathered where they could get the best angle on other people’s worst day. Parents arrived too fast and left too slowly. Teenagers tried to look unaffected and failed in the small places: clenched jaws, shaking hands, laughter too sharp to be real.

You were kneeling on the pavement in front of a boy who could not have been older than twelve.

The boy was sitting with his back against the brick wall, knees pulled to his chest, breathing too fast while a woman who might have been his aunt hovered nearby, terrified and helpless. There was blood on his sleeve. Not much. Probably not his. That was often worse. Duke had learned that sometimes the body knew the difference and sometimes it absolutely did not.

You did not touch him. That was the first thing Duke noticed.

You sat close enough to be present and far enough to be refused. One hand rested palm-up on your own knee, open and undemanding. Your voice did not carry, but Duke’s enhanced perception caught the shape of it anyway, the low rhythm, the steadiness.

“You’re not in trouble,” you said. “You don’t have to talk. You don’t have to make sense. You just have to breathe for this second. Not the whole day. Just this one.”

The boy’s breath hitched.

You smiled, small and tired and heartbreakingly patient. “Yeah. That one. Good. Want to try another?”

The aunt was crying silently now. You glanced at her, not away from the boy exactly, but wide enough to include her in the room your voice was building around him.

“You too,” you said gently. “He can see you holding your breath.”

The woman made a broken sound that might have been a laugh.

Then the light around you changed.

Duke went still on the rooftop across the street.

It was not visible to everyone. No one else reacted. No golden glow burst dramatically from your hands. No halo, no special effects, no cinematic nonsense Tim would later accuse him of describing “with unnecessary poetic bias.” But Duke saw it. Light gathered around you as if the air itself remembered warmth and had decided to return it. Not bright. Not sharp. Softer than sunlight, stranger than electricity. It moved from you in a slow, breathing pulse, brushed against the boy, against the aunt, against the tense cluster of people gathered too close because fear always drew witnesses.

The boy’s shoulders lowered. The aunt exhaled. Even the crowd seemed to loosen by degrees, anger and panic stepping back far enough for people to hear the paramedic asking questions.

Duke crouched on the rooftop with one hand against the ledge and stared.

You were glowing.

No. That was too simple.

You were giving light away.

He should have reported it to Bruce immediately. That was protocol, probably. Unknown meta activity near a trauma scene. Community impact. Potential emotional influence. Possible threat, possible ally, possible anything. There would be a file. There were always files. Bruce loved files the way other people loved houseplants, except houseplants usually did less damage to relationships.

Duke did not report you. Instead, he watched you help the boy stand when the boy finally nodded yes to your offered hand. He watched you make sure the aunt had water, watched you redirect a reporter with a look so sharp Duke nearly laughed, watched you step around the side of the building once the crisis loosened enough for other hands to hold it.

You leaned against the alley wall.

Your glow dimmed. Just for a second.

Duke’s smile faded.

You pressed a hand to your chest like something inside hurt, breathed through it, then straightened before anyone could see.

But Duke had seen.

That was how it began: not with a mission, not officially, not with Batman placing a file in front of him and saying Signal, look into this. It began with daylight, a shaking boy, your open hand, and Duke Thomas realising that the person who made everyone else breathe easier looked like they had forgotten how to do it for themself.

He met you properly three days later, out of costume, because Duke had been raised with some manners and because walking into a community centre dressed as Signal to ask why someone glowed emotionally felt like a fast way to make an already weird conversation fully deranged.

Hilltop Community Centre was loud in the way living places were loud. Sneakers squeaked on the gym floor. Someone laughed too hard in the hallway. A baby cried in the front office. A kettle boiled in the staff kitchen. Posters covered the walls: tenant rights workshops, food pantry hours, free tutoring, grief group, youth art club, mutual aid meetings, a missing cat flyer with the words HE IS VERY RUDE BUT LOVED written under a blurry orange face.

Duke liked it immediately.

He found you in the multipurpose room trying to mediate a disagreement between two teenagers and one elderly woman over whether the mural they were painting should include Batman. You stood between them with a paint-stained sleeve and the expression of someone seriously considering whether Gotham had ever once allowed a normal civic arts project to occur. 

“What if,” you said, very carefully, “we include the skyline, and people can interpret whatever shapes they want in the shadows?”

The teen narrowed their eyes. “That’s diplomatic.”

“That’s cowardly,” the woman said.

“That’s community arts funding,” you replied.

Duke laughed.

You turned. For a second, your eyes met his, and Duke watched recognition fail to happen. Not Signal, then. Just a stranger in a yellow hoodie standing in the doorway with his hands in his pockets and a smile he hoped looked normal.

You looked him over, not suspiciously exactly, but with the alert warmth of someone used to strangers arriving with needs. “Can I help you?”

“Probably,” Duke said. “But I was hoping to volunteer before I became a problem.”

Your mouth twitched. “Ambitious. Most people skip straight to problem.”

“I’m an overachiever.”

“Dangerous thing to be in Gotham.”

“Yeah, I’ve heard.”

You introduced yourself. Duke gave you his name and watched the moment it registered.

“Duke Thomas,” you said.

He braced for recognition of a different kind. Foster kid. Wayne-adjacent. The one from the Narrows. The one who disappeared for a while. The one whose name had appeared in too many news stories written by people who did not know what they were talking about.

Instead, you pointed at him. “You’re the guy who fixed the after-school program’s projector last year.”

Duke blinked. “That’s what I’m known for?”

“Among eight-year-olds who wanted movie day, yes. You’re basically a legend.”

He smiled despite himself. “I’ll take it.”

“You should. They still talk about it. One kid said you understood HDMI with your soul.”

“That might be the nicest thing anyone has ever said about me.”

“Stick around. Gotham kids can humble you fast.” You handed him a stack of flyers before he could decide whether that counted as flirting. “Here. Make yourself useful, projector prophet.”

And Duke, who had joined superhero teams, fought shadow monsters, survived Gotham’s particular brand of nonsense, and stood beside Batman without flinching, took the flyers and said, “Yes, boss.”

That was the first time you smiled at him. Not the soft smile you gave frightened kids. Not the professional one used to calm angry parents or city officials. A real smile, amused and a little surprised.

The light around you warmed.

Duke felt something in his chest answer.

Oh, he thought. That might be a problem.

You became friends in the way people became friends in places that needed too much work: accidentally, then all at once.

Duke started volunteering twice a week. At least, that was what he told himself. Tuesdays and Thursdays, unless patrol ran long, unless a mission needed him, unless Bruce called a meeting that could have been an encrypted text, unless Gotham did what Gotham did and turned a weekday into a crisis buffet. He fixed the projector again, then the computer lab, then the back door lock, then the flickering fluorescent light in the tutoring room because it gave three kids headaches and made you glare at it like personal betrayal.

“You know,” you said one evening from the doorway while he stood on a chair with a screwdriver between his teeth, “when I asked if you were handy, I did not mean you personally had to declare war on the entire building.”

Duke took the screwdriver from his mouth. “This building started it.”

“The building is seventy years old.”

“Old enough to know better.”

You folded your arms, smiling. “You talk to wiring often?”

“Only when it disrespects me.”

“That explains why the toaster in the kitchen works now.”

“That toaster had an attitude problem.”

“You fixed it by threatening it?”

“I prefer ‘motivational speech.’”

You laughed, and the sound warmed the room more than the lights did.

Duke liked you. That was the simple version, and because Duke was not Tim, he did not need six spreadsheets and a sleep-deprivation spiral to admit it to himself. He liked you. He liked the way you joked when tired but went quiet when someone needed listening. He liked the way you remembered names, food allergies, court dates, favourite colours, which kids hated being touched, which elderly neighbours pretended not to need help carrying groceries, and which ex-gang members preferred tea because coffee made their hands shake.

He liked the way animals found you. The orange missing cat from the flyer turned up one rainy afternoon, soaked, furious, and deeply committed to biting anyone who suggested rescue. You crouched in the alley behind the centre with a towel over one arm and spoke to him like he was a tiny war criminal with understandable grievances.

“Okay,” you said. “You are very scary. We all respect that.”

The cat hissed.

Duke leaned against the doorframe. “He looks like he pays taxes in spite.”

“He has seen things.”

“He saw a puddle and lost.”

“He is processing.”

The cat hissed again, but the light around you gathered softly. You did not force it. Duke could see that now, or thought he could. Your power did not lash out like a command. It hovered, offered, waited. The cat’s ears lowered by fractions. Its breathing slowed. After ten minutes, it allowed you to wrap it in the towel, though it glared the entire time.

Duke shook his head. “You just negotiated with a wet cheese puff.”

“He has a name.”

“Please don’t say Mr Whiskers.”

You checked the flyer. “Lucifer.”

Duke stared.

You held up the angry towel bundle. “That tracks.”

He laughed so hard that Lucifer tried to kill him through fabric.

You looked over at him, eyes bright, and for a second the alley with its dumpsters and rainwater and cracked pavement became the best place in Gotham.

That was the second problem.

The first was that Duke could see your light. The second was that he wanted to stand in it even when it was not meant for him.

You did not know he was Signal at first.

Duke assumed that, anyway. In hindsight, he should have given you more credit.

Signal and Duke existed in your life like two daylight shadows that did not quite overlap. Signal appeared at crisis scenes, bright yellow suit cutting through the smoke and panic, helping people out of overturned buses, escorting kids across streets turned dangerous by villain debris, catching falling scaffolding before it crushed a food pantry delivery. Duke appeared at Hilltop with coffee, toolkits, and a face too innocent whenever you asked why he had bruised knuckles.

You were kind enough not to say anything. For a while.

The villain first struck a playground. That was what made it personal before anyone knew what it was.

Not a bank. Not a gala. Not a WayneTech facility with security systems and insurance policies. A playground at eleven in the morning, full of toddlers, grandparents, caregivers, and teenagers cutting class and pretending they were not watching the little kids fondly. One moment, the place was bright with winter sun. The next, every shadow lengthened in the wrong direction.

Children stopped laughing. Adults froze. Darkness spread from beneath the slide, not like smoke, but like the absence of wanting to move. Duke arrived as Signal four minutes after the first emergency call and found the playground sitting under a dome of dim, oily shade that his eyes rejected on principle. It was not ordinary darkness. It bent light badly, swallowing edges, muting colour, making every face inside look washed in old fear.

A little girl stood on top of the climbing frame, staring at nothing. Her grandmother knelt below with one hand lifted, tears running silently down her face.

Nobody moved.

Duke stepped into the field and felt the despair hit him like cold water.

Not fear toxin. Not magic exactly. Something engineered or empowered to drain momentum from emotion itself. It did not tell him he was afraid. It told him there was no point in being brave. No point in lifting his hand. No point in calling out, saving anyone, trying at all. Gotham had always been broken. People always got hurt. Light always failed eventually.

Duke gritted his teeth.

“Oh,” he muttered. “I hate this.”

Then you ran into the playground.

Of course you did.

No suit. No armour. Just a coat thrown over your community centre shirt and your expression set in that terrible way people looked when they were about to be selfless in a manner that would make everyone else furious later.

Signal turned toward you. “You need to get out of here.”

You looked at him and, with absolutely no hesitation, said, “So do you, Duke.”

There were, he reflected later, better times to have his secret identity casually murdered. This was not one of them.

He stared at you through the bright lenses of his mask. “We are going to talk about that.”

“You wear your emotional posture like a signature.”

“My what?”

“Later.”

The little girl on the climbing frame swayed.

You moved. Duke swore and moved with you.

The darkness pressed harder as you crossed the playground. Duke pulled light toward his hands, forcing brightness through the field in sharp pulses. The shadows recoiled where his power touched them but surged back immediately, hungry and patient. Beside him, your light gathered, visible only to his eyes, warm and gold against the wrong dark.

“You can counter it?” he asked.

“I can help them want to move.”

“That’s different.”

“Different enough.”

You reached the grandmother first. You did not touch her, only crouched low in her line of sight.

“Can you hear me?” you asked.

Her eyes shifted toward you with enormous effort.

“Your granddaughter needs you to call her name,” you said. “I know it feels impossible. But she knows your voice. Give her one word.”

The woman’s mouth trembled.

Your light spread, not erasing the darkness but making a pocket inside it where breath could happen.

“Lina,” the grandmother whispered.

The little girl blinked.

Duke sent a pulse of light up toward the climbing frame. Not enough to blind. Just enough to catch her attention, to carve a path through the despair.

You lifted your hand. “Lina, sweetheart. Look at your grandmother. That’s it. One step down. Just one.”

The girl moved.

The whole playground seemed to inhale.

After that, the rescue became a rhythm: Duke breaking the darkness in flashes, you warming the emotional paralysis enough for people to follow his light. He pointed paths open. You made people believe they could take them. Children cried. Adults stumbled. A teenager collapsed into Duke’s arms and kept saying, “I didn’t care if I died,” with horror dawning fresh each time.

You heard every word.

Duke saw your glow brighten. He thought, then, that your power rose to meet need like his did. That adrenaline made it stronger. That whatever it cost, if it cost anything, was manageable because you were still standing, still speaking, still making the impossible gentler by inches.

He did not know. That ignorance would become the thing he returned to later, turning it over and over in his hands until it cut.

After the playground, the case became a pattern.

A clinic lost power at noon and filled with shadows that made patients stop taking medication, stop calling for help, stop believing pain was worth treating. A school hallway dimmed between classes, and thirty-two students sat down where they stood, silent and unreachable. A food pantry opened its doors to a line of people who suddenly could not remember why they had bothered coming.

Every attack targeted bright places.

Not literally, always. Emotionally. Places where people gathered to keep one another alive in ordinary ways. Places with bulletin boards and bad coffee. Places with donated coats, free lunches, after-school programs, group therapy, music lessons, legal aid, AA meetings, vaccination drives. Places Duke knew because he had grown up around the kind of need that learned every safe doorway in a ten-block radius.

Whoever was doing this was not just attacking Gotham. They were attacking its reasons to continue.

Duke hated them immediately and with focus.

You became part of the investigation because you refused not to be.

Bruce tried to object. You listened respectfully for exactly nineteen seconds, then said, “Batman, with all due respect, I work with half the people being targeted. You can either include me or waste time pretending I won’t show up anyway.”

Jason, leaning against the Cave railing, snorted. “I like this one.”

Bruce’s mouth tightened.

Duke, standing beside you, looked straight ahead and tried not to smile.

Tim said, “Statistically, they’re not wrong.”

Damian said, “Unfortunately.”

“You too?” Bruce asked.

Damian lifted his chin. “I respect competence.”

You leaned toward Duke and whispered, “Did I just get Damian Wayne approval?”

Duke whispered back, “Frame the moment. It may never happen again.”

Damian’s eyes narrowed. “I can hear you.”

“Then hear this,” Jason said. “B’s outvoted.”

“I did not call a vote,” Bruce said.

“That’s why you lost.”

The meeting continued because the Batfamily, despite being a collection of emotionally repressed vigilantes with control issues and dramatic capes, did occasionally manage to do their jobs.

Tim identified a probable source: a former WayneTech photonics researcher named Dr Maris Vostok, who had disappeared after a failed project involving light-responsive neural tech. Duke found the emotional signature of her darkness fields similar to what he had seen in older records from metahuman despair effects, but mechanical, distorted, amplified. Bruce found funding links to shell companies. Barbara found city maps with circles around community spaces.

You sat at the table and stared at the map.

Duke watched your face.

“What?” he asked softly.

You pointed to the next likely target.

“Hilltop,” you said.

The room went quiet.

Duke’s stomach dropped.

Bruce said, “We’ll secure it.”

You looked at him. “No.”

His eyes narrowed. “No?”

“If you turn Hilltop into a Bat operation, people will panic before she even gets there. You need it open. Normal. Staffed by people they know.”

“Absolutely not,” Duke said.

You turned to him.

He heard his own voice and realised it had come out too sharp.

Your expression softened. “Duke.”

“No,” he said again, quieter but firmer. “She’s targeting places after emotional distress builds. That means she needs people there. You’re talking about using the centre as bait.”

“I’m talking about not abandoning the people who will come whether I’m there or not.”

“That is not better.”

“It is honest.”

He stared at you.

The light around you was steady, warm, infuriatingly resolute.

Duke had spent enough time around Bats to recognise self-sacrifice dressed up as strategy. Bruce did it like breathing. Dick did it with a smile. Tim did it with caffeine and plausible deniability. Damian did it with insults. Jason pretended he did not do it and then threw himself in front of bullets as if irony made him bulletproof.

You did it gently. That made it no less reckless.

After the meeting, Duke found you in the Manor hallway outside the Cave, standing near an old window where late-afternoon sun caught dust in the air. You looked tired, but not afraid.

“You knew it would be Hilltop,” he said.

You did not pretend otherwise. “I suspected.”

“Before the meeting?”

“Yes.”

His jaw tightened. “And you didn’t tell me.”

“I was going to.”

“When?”

You looked out the window. “When I knew how to say it without you making that face.”

“What face?”

“The face that says you are about to carry something that is not yours just because you can see it.”

Duke stopped.

You looked at him then, and your expression was too knowing, too gentle, too easy to want. “You’re not the only one who protects things in daylight.”

“I know that.”

“Do you?”

He exhaled. “I know you’re brave.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

“I know you’re capable.”

“Closer.”

“I know you don’t need me to save you,” he said, and hated how much effort it took.

Your face softened.

“But,” Duke added, “I also know you’re very bad at counting yourself as someone worth protecting.”

Something flickered in your expression.

There. A crack. Not big. Not enough. But there.

“You say that like you’re good at it,” you said.

Duke laughed once. “I’m Batman-adjacent. None of us are good at it.”

“Then maybe don’t lecture from inside the glass house.”

“Maybe stop throwing stones at yourself.”

“That was awful.”

“I panicked.”

You laughed.

He smiled, but it faded quickly. “I’m serious.”

“I know.”

“Do I need to worry about your power?”

You stilled.

Just for a moment.

Duke saw it. He would think about that later too.

“What do you mean?” you asked.

“I can see it,” he said. “When you use it. It gets brighter around you. Does it… I don’t know, burn out? Overload?”

Your gaze slipped away.

“Everyone gets tired,” you said.

That was not an answer.

Duke knew it. You knew he knew it. But the phone in your pocket buzzed before he could push, and the moment broke under the weight of crisis. Another minor darkness flare near a bus stop. Three people affected. No casualties.

By the time it was over, neither of you returned to the question.

That became your lie by omission. Duke’s was believing he had time to ask again.

Hilltop opened the next morning. It felt wrong to Duke, the normalcy of it. The centre smelled like coffee, floor cleaner, and toast from the kitchen. Kids argued over markers in the art room. Volunteers stacked donated tins by expiration date. Mrs Alvarez from the tenant association bullied two city council interns into carrying chairs with the cheerful violence of an elder who had seen worse men fold under less. The missing cat Lucifer, now unofficially the centre’s emotional support menace, slept on top of a filing cabinet with one eye open.

You moved through it all like the centre’s heartbeat. Duke watched from the roof across the street as Signal, sunlight catching on the yellow of his suit. Batman had people on the perimeter. Oracle monitored power grids and comms. Red Robin had drones hidden in places no normal person would think to look because Tim’s relationship with privacy was creative at best. Spoiler and Orphan were inside in civilian clothes. Nightwing covered evacuation routes. Red Hood was somewhere nearby, presumably violating at least two weapons ordinances.

Everything was prepared. Which, in Gotham, usually meant something would go wrong in a more creative direction.

At 11:43, the sun vanished from Hilltop’s windows.

Not outside. Just in.

Every window went black at once, as if someone had poured ink down the glass.

Duke moved before Oracle finished saying his name. He crashed through the rooftop access door and into a hallway where the light had turned thick and wrong. The darkness field was stronger this time, cold enough to frost the edges of his thoughts. Voices muffled around him. A child whimpered. Someone dropped a tray in the kitchen. Then the emotional weight hit.

Hopelessness. Not sadness. Sadness had texture, history, motion. This was emptier. A hand around the part of the soul that reached forward. Duke staggered, one palm hitting the wall.

No point. The thought slid through him in a voice that was not his. No point saving one place. No point being light in a city that always finds more dark. No point trying. No point—

Duke pulled light into his hand until it burned bright enough to hurt.

“Yeah,” he said through clenched teeth, “I’ve heard better arguments from gargoyles.”

He pushed forward.

Your light was already in the building. He could see it through the walls. Gold and warm, pulsing from the multipurpose room. Too bright, almost. Brighter than he had ever seen it, wide enough to reach every hallway, every frightened person, every child frozen under the darkness. Relief hit him with the sight.

You were okay. You were holding.

He found you in the centre of the room.

You stood among dozens of people sitting or crouched on the floor, speaking steadily while darkness pressed against the walls like a living tide. Your hands were open at your sides. Your face was pale but calm. The glow around you filled the room, not defeating the shadow but keeping it from swallowing everyone whole.

“Listen to my voice,” you said. “You don’t have to feel brave. You don’t have to feel hopeful. Just find one thing you can do. Move your hand. Blink. Say your name. Look at someone beside you. One thing means you’re still here.”

People began to move in tiny increments. A boy whispered his own name. A woman reached for her neighbour. Lucifer hissed from under a chair, which, frankly, also seemed like an act of resistance.

Duke entered the room with light gathered around both fists. You turned toward him, and the smile you gave him was so relieved it nearly knocked him off balance.

“Signal,” you said.

“Hey,” he said, because apparently imminent doom did not improve his conversational skills around you. “Nice ambience.”

“Thought we’d try something intimate. Community centre meets existential void.”

“Bold theme.”

“Too much?”

“Little heavy-handed.”

Someone near the wall gave a weak laugh. The sound mattered.

Duke stepped beside you and sent light outward in careful bursts, breaking pathways through the dark. “We need to evacuate.”

“I’m keeping them responsive.”

“I know.”

“You find Vostok?”

“Working on it.”

As if summoned by her name, Dr Maris Vostok appeared on the far stage where kids usually performed talent shows and deeply chaotic puppet plays. She wore a harness of black metal and glass nodes, each one bending the light around her into a halo of absence. Her hair floated slightly, lifted by static. Her face looked grey with exhaustion and conviction, the worst combination Gotham had to offer.

“You’re both very inspiring,” she said. Her voice echoed through the room from hidden speakers. “That’s the problem.”

Duke shifted in front of you.

You muttered, “Do not start with me.”

He did not look back. “Start what?”

“The body-blocking thing.”

“I’m standing.”

“You are strategically standing.”

“I’m allowed to stand places.”

“Duke.”

Vostok laughed. “Still arguing. That’s good. It means the field hasn’t finished.”

Duke lifted one hand. Light sparked between his fingers. “Turn it off.”

“Do you know what hope does to people?” Vostok asked.

“Generally improves the vibe.”

“It exhausts them,” she said sharply. “It makes them crawl forward for scraps. It convinces them that suffering has meaning if they can narrate it prettily enough. Gotham runs on that lie. Heroes like you sell it every day.”

Duke’s jaw tightened.

You stepped beside him, not behind. “And your solution is what? Make everyone give up before the city disappoints them?”

“My solution is mercy.”

“No,” you said. “Mercy gives people somewhere safe to fall. You’re cutting their legs out from under them and calling the floor kindness.”

Vostok’s expression twitched.

Duke glanced at you.

You were glowing brighter. Too bright. Something about it scraped at his nerves. He murmured your name in warning.

“I’m okay.” There it was again. Not a true answer.

Vostok lifted her hand.

The darkness slammed inward.

People cried out. Duke threw both hands up, light bursting from him in a radiant shield across the room. The field buckled, shadows peeling back from the windows, but Vostok’s machine shrieked and compensated. The despair deepened, targeting not sight now but will. Duke felt knees hit the floor behind him. Felt his own arms shake as the darkness crawled over his light.

Then your power surged.

The room filled with warmth. Not comfort like a blanket. Not gentle this time. This was a bonfire in a snowstorm. A flare sent up from the last person awake on a sinking ship. Duke watched gold light pour from you in waves, through every person in the centre, through him, through even the places Vostok’s darkness had made numb.

People began to stand.

Not because they were unafraid. Because they remembered fear was not the only thing inside them.

Mrs Alvarez rose first, because of course she did, one hand braced on a chair and fury in every line of her small body. “I have survived five landlords, two floods, and the city council,” she snapped at the darkness. “I am not being emotionally murdered before lunch.”

Jason’s voice crackled over comms. “I love her.”

“Focus,” Bruce said.

“I am focused. On her. She’s my hero now.”

Duke would have laughed if he had not been holding back a despair machine with both hands.

You took one step forward. Then another. Duke saw the light around you flicker.

Not dim exactly. Thin. Like fabric pulled too tight.

His stomach dropped.

“Hey,” he said. “Ease up.”

“I can hold them.”

“That’s not what I said.”

Vostok’s eyes fixed on you with sudden fascination. “Oh. You’re the battery.”

The words landed wrong.

Duke’s head turned sharply toward you. Your face had gone bloodless.

Vostok smiled slowly. “That’s how you do it. You’re not generating hope. You’re redistributing nervous system stability through an empathic field. But not externally sourced. Not ambient.” Her smile widened. “It’s you.”

Duke felt cold beneath the heat of his own light.

“What does she mean?” he asked.

You did not look at him. “Nothing.”

Vostok laughed. “They didn’t tell you?”

Duke’s light flickered. 

You immediately fed warmth toward him, instinctive and terrified. He felt it brush the edge of his fear.

He stepped away.

Not far. Enough.

Your face crumpled for half a second.

Duke hated that too.

“Don’t,” he said, voice low.

“I’m sorry.”

“What does she mean?”

The darkness pressed harder. You swayed.

Duke saw it then. Not just the gold leaving you. Not just the warmth moving outward. The absence it left behind. Every time your power surged, your own light thinned. Every person who stood steadier made you less steady. Every breath you gave the room took something from yours. You had been doing this from the beginning. Playground. Clinic. School. Pantry. Hilltop. Every scene where he had thought you were brilliant and brave and glowing.

You had been burning. And he had stood beside you admiring the light.

“Oh,” Duke whispered.

Your eyes filled. “Duke—”

The ceiling lights exploded. Darkness crashed down. Duke lost sight of you for one terrifying second.

Then the room split into chaos.

Vostok’s machine overloaded under the competing force of Duke’s photonic shield and your empathic flare. The shadows fractured into jagged patches, each one throwing people into their worst emotional lows. Duke saw a kid sink to the floor near the mural wall. Saw Stephanie, still in civilian clothes, grab two people and drag them toward the exit. Saw Cassandra move through darkness like it had offended her personally. Saw Batman drop through a skylight that had definitely not been open before.

And you—

You were moving toward Vostok.

“No,” Duke said.

You did not stop. Of course, you didn’t.

Vostok aimed the machine at the evacuees, not at you, and you did exactly what she wanted. You opened yourself wider. Your light filled the room so completely that Duke’s vision went gold-white for half a breath. The despair field shattered around the civilians. People ran. Doors opened. Sunlight cut through from outside as Red Robin killed the window shielding systems.

For one bright, impossible moment, Hilltop became full of daylight.

Then your glow went out.

You collapsed.

Duke did not remember crossing the room. One second, he was holding a shield. The next, he was on his knees beside you, hands hovering because he did not know where to touch without hurting you. Your skin was cold. Too cold. Your breathing was shallow. There was blood under your nose. Your eyes were half-open but unfocused, staring past him at a ceiling you had no strength left to see.

“No,” Duke said. His voice did not sound like his.

You blinked slowly.

“Hey,” you whispered.

“Don’t you hey me.”

Your mouth twitched. “Rude.”

“You collapsed.”

“Noticed that.”

“Why are you cold?”

You did not answer.

“Why are you cold?” he repeated, and this time his voice broke around it.

Your gaze shifted toward him with enormous effort. “Duke.”

“No. No, don’t do the soft voice. Don’t make this easier for me.”

Your eyes filled.

Around you, the fight continued. Batman and Cassandra took Vostok down. Red Hood secured the machine with unnecessary aggression. Nightwing directed the last evacuees out. Red Robin’s voice snapped over comms about energy readings and medical response. But all of it felt far away, separated from Duke by the terrifying smallness of your breath.

He pulled off one glove with his teeth and touched your wrist.

Your pulse fluttered under his fingers.

Too fast. Too weak.

“You knew,” he said. You closed your eyes. “You knew it did this.”

“I had it handled.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“I know.”

“Stop saying you know when you didn’t tell me.”

Your eyes opened again. The hurt in them almost shut him up.

Almost.

“I asked,” Duke said, quieter now, worse. “I asked if I needed to worry about your power.”

“You had enough to worry about.”

He laughed once, and it came out broken. “Wow.”

“Duke—”

“No. You don’t get to decide that for me.”

“I wasn’t trying to—”

“You were.” His hand tightened around yours. “You were trying to protect me from worrying while letting me stand next to you and watch you disappear in real time.”

A tear slipped from the corner of your eye into your hairline.

“I didn’t want you to stop me,” you whispered.

That one landed like a confession because it was.

Duke stared at you. Behind him, the machine sparked and died. 

Sunlight returned fully through the windows. It touched your face and made you look even paler.

“You didn’t want me to stop you,” he repeated.

You swallowed.

“No,” you said.

Duke’s throat tightened with so much anger and fear and grief that for a second he could not speak. He had been angry before. At villains. At systems. At Bruce, sometimes, though Duke was better than most at understanding the difference between leadership and control. But this anger hurt differently because it came tangled with the fact that he cared about you so much his whole body felt like a bruise.

“You made me watch you burn,” he said.

Your face crumpled.

“I saved them,” you whispered.

“I know.” His voice cracked. “That’s why this hurts.”

You looked away.

He hated himself immediately and did not take it back.

Because you had saved them. You had saved the children, the volunteers, the elders, the people who came to Hilltop because it was one of the few places in Gotham that asked what they needed before asking what they had done. You had saved them, and you had hurt yourself doing it, and Duke did not know how to be angry without feeling cruel or scared without sounding controlling.

So he did the only thing he could.

He stayed. He slid one arm carefully under your shoulders and lifted you enough to wrap his cape around you, bright yellow fabric covering your trembling body. Your head tipped weakly against his chest.

“Medical,” he said into comms, voice tight. “Now.”

“ETA three minutes,” Oracle replied, softer than usual.

You tried to move. “The others—”

“Are standing because of you.”

“I need to check—”

“You need to breathe.”

“But—”

Duke looked down at you, eyes burning. “Please.”

That stopped you.

Not because he commanded it. Because he asked, and his voice broke when he did.

You closed your eyes.

“Okay,” you whispered.

He held you in the ruined community centre, surrounded by broken glass, sunlight, and the people you had saved crying in each other’s arms. The mural on the wall had survived somehow. The skyline was half-painted, shadows left ambiguous under the brushstrokes. In the corner, Lucifer emerged from beneath an overturned chair and hissed at the remains of the despair machine like he had personally defeated it.

Under any other circumstances, Duke might have laughed. Instead, he pressed his cheek briefly to the top of your head and whispered, so quietly only you could hear, “You are people too.”

You did not answer.

But your hand, cold and shaking under his cape, curled weakly around his sleeve.

The Cave medbay was too bright. Duke had always found that ironic. The Bats lived in darkness but lit their medical spaces like they were interrogating injuries into submission. You lay on a cot under thermal blankets, IV fluids running into your arm, a monitor tracking the pulse that had scared three years off Duke’s life and probably given Alfred new material for his private lecture collection.

You had not woken yet.

Duke sat beside you in half his Signal gear, cowl down, gloves off, one knee bouncing until Dick placed a hand on it and said, gently, “Hey.”

Duke stopped. For eleven seconds. Then started again.

Dick wisely removed his hand.

Across the medbay, Bruce spoke quietly with Alfred. Tim was at the computer, pulling up readings from the attack and looking increasingly unhappy in a very Tim way, which meant data was confirming emotions nobody wanted. Jason leaned against the wall with his arms crossed, helmet off, expression thunderous. Steph sat on a rolling stool, still in the clothes she had worn undercover, one leg tucked under her. Cass stood near the door, eyes on you, silent and watchful.

Duke stared at your face. In the Cave light, your glow was barely visible to him.

Not gone. Never gone.

But small. A banked ember where there had been daylight.

His chest hurt every time he looked at it.

“How long?” he asked.

The room went quiet.

Bruce looked at him.

Duke did not look away from you. “How long has everyone known?”

No one answered fast enough.

Jason swore under his breath.

Duke laughed once, humourless. “Great.”

Tim turned in his chair. “I didn’t know the degree. Not until now.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

Tim’s mouth closed.

Bruce said, “We knew there was a cost.”

Duke finally looked at him.

Something in Bruce’s expression shifted. Good, Duke thought distantly. Let him see it.

“And nobody told me.”

“It wasn’t ours to tell,” Dick said softly.

Duke’s anger swung toward him, unfair and immediate. “But it was mine to miss?”

Dick absorbed that like someone who knew the shape of guilt too well to deflect it. “No.”

Alfred stepped forward, voice quiet. “Master Duke, I suspect they did not wish the cost known.”

“I get that.” Duke stood because sitting was suddenly impossible. “I get privacy. I get boundaries. I get not outing someone’s medical or meta details without consent. But you all let them go into the field knowing this could happen.”

“They are an adult,” Bruce said.

Duke’s eyes snapped to him. “Don’t.” Bruce went still. “Do not use autonomy as a shield just because it gets you out of admitting you were willing to let them hurt themself if it saved the room.”

The silence after that was sharp enough to cut. 

Jason looked almost proud. Bruce looked, for once, like he had no immediate answer.

Duke’s voice lowered. “They saved people. I know that. They chose to be there. I know that too. But all of you— all of us— we keep doing this thing where someone burns themself down, and we call it their choice because that sounds better than admitting we needed the fire.”

Your monitor beeped steadily.

No one spoke.

Duke looked back at you, anger draining into something more frightened.

“I was standing right there,” he said. “I can see light better than anyone, and I didn’t see them going out.”

Cass moved first. She crossed the medbay silently and stood beside him. Then, after a moment, she touched two fingers lightly to his wrist.

Not comfort, exactly. Acknowledgment.

Duke breathed in.

“Seeing is not the same as knowing,” Cass said.

It was the longest sentence he had heard from her all day. It did exactly what it needed to.

Duke nodded once, swallowing hard.

Jason pushed off the wall. “For the record, when they wake up, I’m yelling.”

“You are not yelling in my medbay,” Alfred said.

“Firmly expressing disappointment.”

“No.”

“Emotionally gesturing?”

Alfred looked at him.

Jason sighed. “Fine. I’ll loom.”

“You may loom from a medically appropriate distance.”

Steph wiped at her eyes with her sleeve. “This family is so normal.”

You woke three hours later. Duke knew because your light shifted before your eyes opened.

He had been sitting beside you again, elbows on his knees, staring at his hands. Most of the others had been exiled by Alfred under the pretense of “not turning recovery into a vigilante waiting room,” though Duke suspected you had more guards nearby than the president. Bruce had left last and only after Duke promised to call if anything changed, which was a sentence neither of them unpacked.

Your fingers twitched.

Duke looked up. Your eyes opened slowly, unfocused at first, then finding him.

“Hey,” you whispered.

Duke closed his eyes.

“I swear,” he said, “if you say that to me one more time after almost dying, I’m going to lose my mind.”

Your mouth curved faintly. “Hi?”

“Worse.”

“Good evening?”

“Unbelievable.”

You tried to laugh and winced.

Duke stood immediately. “Don’t move.”

“You sound like Batman.”

“That is the meanest thing anyone has ever said to me.”

Your smile softened.

Then memory returned. He saw it happen. Your face changed, guilt moving in before pain had even finished taking its shoes off.

“Duke—”

“No.”

You flinched.

He sat back down, dragging a hand over his face. “Sorry. Not no like that. Just… don’t start by apologising in a way that makes me have to comfort you before I get to be upset.”

Your eyes filled.

You nodded once.

Duke exhaled slowly.

For a moment, neither of you spoke. The medbay hummed around you.

Finally, you said, “How many people were hurt?”

“Minor injuries. No fatalities. Vostok’s in custody. Hilltop’s damaged, but not gone. Lucifer survived and is being treated like a war hero.”

Your eyes closed in relief.

“Mrs Alvarez told Batman he had poor crowd management instincts.”

Your eyes opened. “She didn’t.”

“She did. Jason proposed adoption.”

That got the smallest laugh out of you. Duke treasured it and hated how fragile it sounded.

Then the silence returned.

You looked at him. “I should have told you.”

“Yes,” he said.

The honesty landed between you.

You nodded, tears slipping down your temples. “I’m sorry.”

“Me too.”

Your brow furrowed. “For what?”

“For being so busy admiring the light that I didn’t ask enough questions about where it came from.”

“That’s not your fault.”

“I know.”

“Duke.”

“I know,” he repeated, and this time his voice roughened. “But knowing doesn’t make it feel true yet.”

Your expression broke.

“I didn’t want you to look at me differently,” you whispered.

His anger softened around the edges, not gone, not forgiving everything, but making room.

“How did you think I looked at you?”

You stared at the ceiling.

“Like I was strong,” you said. “Like I could help. Like I was someone who made things better.”

Duke’s chest ached. “You are strong.”

Your mouth trembled.

“You do help,” he said. “You do make things better. And I’m not going to stop looking at you like that just because I know it costs you.”

You turned your face away.

“But,” Duke continued, because the but mattered and loving someone did not mean letting them escape the hard part, “I am going to get real annoying when you act like the cost doesn’t count.”

A wet laugh escaped you. “How annoying?”

“Tim-with-a-spreadsheet annoying.”

“Oh, that’s bad.”

“Colour-coded.”

“Duke.”

“Maybe graphs.”

“You wouldn’t.”

“I know people.”

“You’re threatening me with data visualisation in my hospital bed.”

“Medbay cot, technically.”

“You spend too much time with vigilantes.”

“That is both true and not a distraction.”

You went quiet.

Duke leaned forward, elbows on his knees. “Why didn’t you want me to stop you?”

Your eyes closed.

There it was. The heart of it. Not the field. Not Vostok. Not the mission. The choice you had made before any darkness machine turned Hilltop’s windows black.

“Because stopping feels like deciding some people don’t get comfort,” you whispered. Duke said nothing. “And I know that’s not fair. I know that isn’t how it works. But when I can feel them hurting, when I know I can make it easier for them to survive the next second, stopping feels like leaving them where I was.”

His throat tightened.

“The power manifested when I was alone,” you said. “I wanted someone to come so badly I thought it might tear me open. No one came. Then something small and hurt found me, and I could make it feel safe. That’s all I ever wanted. For someone to feel safe because I was there.”

Duke looked down at your hand on the blanket. He did not take it.

Not yet. You had spent the whole mission giving yourself away before anyone could ask what you wanted. He would not take even comfort from you without making space for choice.

“That makes sense,” he said.

Your eyes opened, surprised.

“It does,” he said. “It makes sense. It also almost killed you.”

Tears gathered again.

“Both things can be true,” Duke said softly. “That’s the part Gotham keeps messing up. We act like if the reason is good enough, the damage becomes noble.”

You gave a tiny, miserable smile. “That sounds like something Batman needs embroidered on a pillow.”

“I’ll ask Alfred.”

“He would.”

“He absolutely would.”

Your fingers shifted on the blanket.

Duke noticed. You noticed him noticing.

“Can I hold your hand?” he asked.

Your face crumpled. “Yes.”

He took your hand carefully, mindful of the IV tape, the coldness still lingering in your skin. No warmth moved from you. No empathic comfort. No golden light trying to soothe the hurt between you.

Just your hand in his.

Duke brushed his thumb over your knuckles.

“I’m mad at you,” he said.

“I know.”

“I care about you.”

“I know.”

“You do not get to use the second thing to make the first one disappear.”

“I know.”

“And I don’t get to use the first thing to pretend the second one isn’t true.”

Your lips parted slightly.

Duke looked at you, all the fear and anger and tenderness sitting in him without any of them cancelling the others out.

“I like you,” he said. Your breath caught. He laughed under his breath, shaky and small. “Terrible timing, right?”

“Very Gotham.”

“Yeah.”

“You like me?”

“Unfortunately, yes.”

“Unfortunately?”

“You are a reckless emotional support beacon with no sense of self-preservation.”

“You volunteer with Batman.”

“Deflection.”

“You fight shadow monsters in daylight.”

“Still deflection.”

“You called yourself projector prophet once.”

“Now you’re just being hurtful.”

You laughed, and this time it sounded more like you.

Duke smiled before he could stop himself.

Then your expression softened into something vulnerable enough to make his chest feel too small.

“I like you too,” you whispered.

His heart did something stupid. Probably visible from space.

“Yeah?”

“Yes.”

“For my charm, right? Not my emotional posture?”

“Both.”

“That’s fair.”

Your fingers tightened weakly around his. “I’m sorry I scared you.”

His smile faded.

“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you,” you said. “Not because you would have stopped me. Because you should have had the choice to know what standing beside me meant.”

Duke nodded slowly.

“Thank you,” he said.

“For apologising?”

“For saying choice and meaning it.”

Your eyes shone.

He looked down at your joined hands. “New rule.”

“You’re making rules now?”

“Just one.”

“Okay.”

“You ask for help before you start disappearing.”

Your mouth trembled. “I don’t know how.”

Duke had expected that answer. It still hurt.

He lifted your hand slightly, not enough to pull, just enough for you to feel him there.

“Then start with me,” he said.

For a moment, you only looked at him.

Then your face folded around the kind of grief that had been waiting years for permission. You cried quietly, not with the dramatic collapse of someone who had no strength left, but with the exhausted surrender of someone who had finally been told they were allowed to stop pretending the weight was weightless.

Duke stayed.

He did not make the crying smaller. He did not brighten the room. He did not tell you it was okay because it was not, not yet, not fully. He only held your hand while the medbay lights hummed and your pulse steadied under machines that did not understand miracles, only measurements.

Later, when Alfred came in with soup and the expression of a man prepared to enforce it as law, he found Duke still beside you.

You were asleep.

Duke looked up.

Alfred’s gaze moved to your joined hands, then to Duke’s face.

“Master Duke,” he said gently, “you should rest as well.”

Duke looked back at you. Your glow was still dim.

But present.

“I will,” he said.

Alfred’s eyebrow rose.

Duke sighed. “That sounded fake, didn’t it?”

“Painfully.”

“I’ll rest when they wake up again.”

“Marginally better.”

“I learned from the worst.”

“Indeed.”

Alfred set the tray down. Before leaving, he placed one hand briefly on Duke’s shoulder. “They are still here.”

Duke swallowed.

“Yeah,” he said. His thumb brushed once over your knuckles. “Yeah, they are.”

Hilltop reopened two weeks later.

Not fully. One room at first. Then two. The windows had been replaced. The mural had been finished by the kids, who had decided to include neither Batman nor Signal in the skyline but had hidden a small yellow sun in one corner and a tiny orange cat on top of a building. Duke pretended not to get emotional about it and failed badly enough that Stephanie took a photo.

You were not supposed to be working. This was a widely agreed-upon rule made by Alfred, Duke, Bruce, several doctors, Mrs Alvarez, and Lucifer, who expressed his opinion by sitting on your paperwork whenever you tried to organise anything.

You were, however, allowed to sit in the corner with a blanket and “supervise,” which mostly meant children brought you drawings, adults brought you tea, and Duke stood nearby with the expression of someone ready to bodily intercept any attempt at heroic self-sacrifice.

“You are hovering,” you said.

Duke leaned against the wall beside your chair. “I am standing supportively.”

“You’re blocking the supply closet.”

“That supply closet looked suspicious.”

“It contains paper towels.”

“Exactly.”

You smiled down into your tea.

Sunlight poured through the new windows, bright and clean. Duke could see your light better in it now. Still not as strong as before, but steadier. Recovering. You had been annoyed when he described it that way.

“I am not a rechargeable battery,” you had said.

“I know,” Duke replied.

“You brought me to sit in the sun.”

“You said it helped.”

“That is not the point.”

“You’re right. You’re a houseplant.”

You had thrown a cushion at him. Weakly, but with emotional accuracy.

Now, in the community centre, you looked at the mural and then at him.

“You saved them too, you know,” you said.

Duke blinked. “What?”

“At Hilltop.”

“I know I was there.”

“No.” You set your tea down carefully. “I mean, you keep talking like I was the only reason people got out. I wasn’t. You were the path. I was just… momentum.”

Duke studied you.

“I’m trying to accept shared credit,” you said. “Do not make that face.”

“What face?”

“The face like you’re proud of me in a way that makes me want to become furniture.”

Duke smiled. “I am proud of you.”

“Duke.”

“Sorry. Too direct?”

“Yes.”

“Should I insult you instead?”

“Please.”

“You are the most stubborn glowstick I’ve ever met.”

“That was terrible.”

“I panicked again.”

“You keep doing that.”

“Only around you.”

The words landed between you. Softly. Differently than before.

Your smile faded into something shy. Duke’s heart took that as an invitation to become unprofessional.

Across the room, Mrs Alvarez loudly told a volunteer that young people today took too long to admit obvious things. Jason, who had appeared at some point with a box of donated books and no permission, said, “Preach.”

Duke closed his eyes. “I hate everyone.”

You laughed.

Later, when the centre quieted and the winter sun lowered gold across the mural, Duke found you in the small courtyard behind Hilltop. The raised garden beds were mostly dormant, though someone had planted hardy herbs that refused to die out of spite. Lucifer sat on the wall, tail flicking, judging the entire world.

You stood with your face tilted toward the light.

Duke stopped in the doorway.

For a moment, he only looked. Your glow did not fill the courtyard. It did not pour from you in a desperate attempt to save everyone within reach. It sat close to your skin, soft and yours, no longer something you were giving away by default.

You looked peaceful.

Not fixed. Not healed in a single cinematic leap.

But present.

Duke stepped outside.

“You okay?” he asked.

You opened your eyes. “I think so.”

He nodded.

No pushing. No scanning your face for lies like an anxious detective. No grabbing the answer and shaking truth from it. Just accepting that you were learning how to answer and he was learning how to let the answer be yours.

You looked at him. “Are you?”

Duke considered lying. Then he smiled ruefully. “I think so.”

“Copycat.”

“You’re a good influence.”

“That is debatable.”

“Strongly.”

You laughed.

Then, after a small silence, you held out your hand.

Duke looked at it.

Your voice softened. “No powers.”

“I know.”

“I just want to hold your hand.”

His chest warmed.

“Yeah,” he said. “I can do that.”

He took your hand.

Your fingers were still a little cold, but not like they had been in the medbay. Duke folded his hand around yours and felt, with startling clarity, that this was not rescue. Not recovery management. Not community care. Not strategy. Just two people in fading sunlight, choosing contact because they wanted it.

He looked at you. You were already looking at him.

“Can I kiss you?” Duke asked.

Your breath caught.

Lucifer chose that moment to make a deeply judgmental noise from the wall.

Duke glanced at him. “I’m trying to have a moment.”

“He supervises.”

“He’s bad at it.”

“He has standards.”

“He once attacked a paper bag.”

“The bag had poor intentions.”

Duke laughed, then looked back at you. “Question still stands.”

Your smile trembled.

“Yes,” you said. “You can kiss me.”

He stepped closer slowly, giving you every second to change your mind. You did not. Your free hand rose to his sleeve, and Duke felt the simple human weight of it like sunlight.

The kiss was gentle.

No glow flared between you. No empathic warmth spilled out to smooth over nerves or make the moment easier. Your mouth was soft under his, a little hesitant at first, then warmer when he squeezed your hand. Duke kissed you like someone who knew light could be shared without anyone burning. You kissed him back like someone trying, finally, to believe comfort could come toward you too.

When you pulled apart, your forehead rested against his.

“No powers?” you whispered.

Duke smiled. “No powers.”

“Still okay?”

“Very okay.”

You laughed softly, almost disbelieving.

He brushed his thumb over your hand.

“You know,” he said, “being a light doesn’t mean you have to be on fire.”

You groaned. “That was painfully sincere.”

“I know.”

“Awful.”

“Mm-hm.”

“Very attractive, unfortunately.”

His smile widened. “Unfortunately?”

“You heard me.”

Lucifer meowed like he was filing a complaint.

Duke ignored him and kissed you again.

Outside the courtyard, Gotham continued. It always did. There would be more darkness. More awful people with machines and philosophies. More community centers needing repairs. More children needed someone to tell them the next breath mattered. More days when Duke would stand in the sun and fight shadows that thought daylight made people easy to see and easier to break.

But he would not do it alone. 

Neither would you. That was the thing about light, Duke was learning. Not the heroic kind people put on murals. Not the symbolic kind that made speeches sound better. The real kind. The daily kind. The kind passed hand to hand in community kitchens and medbay chairs and courtyards where someone finally learned to ask for help before disappearing.

It did not have to save the whole city at once. Sometimes it only had to stay.

Your hand remained in his as the sun slipped lower.

It did not, not to the League. Children were not children there. Children were potential. Children were weapons still warm from the forge. Children were corrected, honed, praised for obedience and punished for hesitation. Children were told pain was a tutor, fear was a weakness, and love was something other people used to make themselves easier to kill. Damian already knew those lessons. You knew different ones, but they rhymed.

You remembered the first time he looked at you. He stood beside his mother in the training hall, small and severe in black practice clothes, green eyes sharp enough to cut through every adult in the room and still find time to judge the architecture. His hair was damp from training. There was a split near his mouth, already scabbed. He looked at you not like another child, but like a tool he had not requested.

Talia’s hand rested lightly on his shoulder. “This is your new partner.”

Damian’s eyes narrowed.

“I do not require one,” he said. His voice was high with childhood and already heavy with command. You disliked him immediately, which was inconvenient because you had been raised not to dislike assignments.

Talia smiled faintly. “You require many things, my son. You simply do not yet recognise them.”

“I require better opponents.” 

“I agree.” That made his expression sharpen with interest. Then Talia turned to you. Her gaze was beautiful and terrible, like moonlight on a blade. “Show him.”

You did not ask what she meant. Asking would have implied uncertainty. You stepped forward, stopped at the proper distance, and bowed your head. Damian did not bow back. His hands curled at his sides, insulted by your existence.

“Do you intend to fight me?” he asked.

“If commanded.”

His lip curled. “Of course.”

Talia said your name, and the whole room seemed to listen with you. “Calm him.”

Damian’s head snapped toward her. “Mother—”

You reached.

It was not hard then. That was the thing you would later hate remembering. It was easy. Your power moved from you because you had been trained to let it move, because the adults who raised you had understood your gift before you understood yourself. They had taught you that comfort was a weapon with a gentler face. They had taught you that panic could be dulled, rage could be cooled, fear could be softened into compliance. They had never called it kindness. Kindness implied choice.

Warmth left your chest and crossed the distance between you and Damian like breath fogging glass.

He went still. Not docile. Never that. Even at eight, Damian resisted everything on principle, including gravity, sleep, and emotional regulation. But the sharpness in him loosened. His fists uncurled by half a degree. The furious tension in his jaw eased before he could stop it. His eyes widened, not with calm, but with outrage at being made calm.

You felt his anger try to flare and fail.

That was the first time you learned how much Damian hated losing ownership of himself.

It would not be the last.

“What did you do?” he demanded.

You looked to Talia for permission to answer. Damian saw it. His disgust was immediate.

Talia’s smile remained. “They are able to regulate emotional volatility. Fear. Rage. Panic. Distress. The effect is temporary and most useful when paired with discipline.”

“I have discipline,” Damian spat.

“Yes,” Talia said. “And you also have your father’s blood.”

The room changed around that sentence.

You did not know Bruce Wayne then. You did not know Gotham except as the city your handlers spoke of with disdain, as if it were a disease Damian might someday inherit. But you knew, even then, that the mention of his father wounded him in a way he had no language for. You felt the hurt twist under his anger like a hidden blade beneath silk.

Your power moved toward it instinctively.

Damian’s gaze snapped to yours.

“Do not,” he said.

You stopped.

Not because he had asked. Because Talia had lifted one finger.

That distinction would matter later.

At the time, you only lowered your hand and returned to your place.

Talia looked satisfied. “When the time comes for Damian to go to Gotham, you will accompany him.”

Damian’s face darkened. “I will not need a keeper.”

“No,” Talia said softly. “You will need a witness.”

Your assignment was clear. Keep him safe. Keep him focused. Keep him calm when Gotham and blood and Bruce Wayne pulled too hard at the seams of him. You did not understand the shape of that future then. You only understood command.

Damian looked at you like a chain he intended to break. You looked back like a blade meant to hold.

That was how it began: not with affection, not with trust, not with anything resembling softness, but with two children in a hall full of adults who had mistaken usefulness for love and called it training.

You became competent together. 

That was the first kind of intimacy the League allowed. Not friendship. Not tenderness. Not comfort for its own sake. Competence. The clean strike. The silent step. The ability to read the angle of another body mid-fight and know where the next blade would fall. You and Damian learned each other through violence before either of you learned each other through language.

At nine, you knew how he shifted his weight before a left-handed feint. He knew you dropped your right shoulder when preparing to redirect an opponent’s momentum. You knew his anger burned hotter when he was tired, though he would have died before admitting fatigue. He knew your power stuttered if you had not eaten. You knew he hated being corrected in front of others. He knew you hated being praised for making people obedient.

Neither of you said these things aloud. You fought instead.

“Your stance is poor,” Damian told you once after you swept his legs out from under him for the first time.

You stood above him, breathing hard, sweat cooling on your neck. “You are on the floor.”

“Your stance was still poor.”

“You fell to poor technique.”

“I was distracted by its ugliness.”

You kicked his practice blade farther away with the tip of your foot. “Then my ugliness is strategically effective.”

His eyes flashed. Then, to your absolute shock, he smiled.

It was small. Sharp. Gone quickly. But it happened.

You thought about that smile for three days and hated yourself for it.

At ten, he began calling you partner with a sneer.

“Keep up, partner.”

“Do not embarrass me, partner.”

“If you are going to use your ability, do it before the target screams, partner.”

The word was not kind. Not then. It was a designation. A rank. A role assigned by his mother and resented by him with the dedication only Damian could bring to resentment. Still, he used it. Other trainees noticed. Adults noticed. Talia noticed most of all, though she only smiled when she heard it.

You pretended it meant nothing.

Then came the first mission where it mattered.

You were both eleven, sent with a senior assassin to retrieve information from a defector hiding in a border city that smelled of dust, fuel, and oranges rotting in market stalls. The mission should have been simple. Locate. Extract. Return. Instead, the defector had hired mercenaries, and the mercenaries had set the building on fire rather than let the League reclaim what it believed it owned.

Smoke filled the stairwell. The senior assassin went down with a bullet in his throat before either of you had time to process what death looked like when it was not training-room theoretical. Damian lunged toward the shooter with a sound like something torn out of him. You felt it happen before it happened: his rage, sudden and volcanic, grief buried so quickly beneath violence that he would have denied it had ever existed.

You reached for him.

Not because you thought he wanted it. Because that was your purpose.

Your power wrapped around him hard enough to make him stumble.

He turned on you, eyes furious through the smoke. “Release me.”

“You will get us both killed.”

“I gave an order.”

“You are not in command.”

“I am heir to the Demon!”

“You are eleven.”

He looked so offended that, had you not been choking on smoke, you might have laughed.

The shooter fired again. Damian moved. You moved with him. Years later, you would remember the rest in fragments: the heat of the wall against your shoulder, Damian’s hand gripping your sleeve as he pulled you under falling timber, the defector screaming, your power shoved outward to quiet the terror in everyone long enough for Damian to hear the ceiling cracking above you. You both survived. The senior assassin did not.

When you returned, Talia praised Damian for completing the mission. She praised you for keeping him useful.

That night, Damian found you in the training hall long after curfew. You were alone, moving through forms with a practice blade because your hands would not stop shaking and you did not know what else to do with them. You expected him to insult your posture. Instead, he stood in the doorway and watched you for a long time.

“You interfered with me,” he said.

You did not stop moving. “Yes.”

“You used your ability without my consent.”

You did stop then, though at the time the word did not land the way it would years later. Consent was not a concept the League had taught either of you with any sincerity. Orders mattered. Outcomes mattered. Consent was something civilians begged for when they lacked power.

“You were compromised,” you said.

“I was angry.”

“You were reckless.”

“I was grieving.”

The word cracked through the hall.

You looked at him. Damian looked equally startled that he had said it.

For a moment, neither of you moved. Then his face hardened. “Do not repeat that.”

“I won’t.”

“If you tell anyone—”

“I won’t.”

His gaze searched your face, suspicious of mercy because no one had taught him what to do with it. Then he gave a stiff nod and turned to leave.

At the doorway, he paused.

“You are still poor in the fourth sequence,” he said.

Your throat tightened with something dangerously close to laughter. “Good night, Damian.”

He left.

You slept better than usual.

Not because your power worked on you. Because, for once, someone had not left the room unchanged.

When Damian went to Gotham, you went with him. By then, you were both thirteen and had become a terrible two-person machine. He was faster. You were steadier. He struck first. You read the room. He carried the bloodline, the name, the terrible expectations of a grandfather who believed legacy was something sharpened against the bones of children. You carried the warmth that kept him from burning too hot when anger clouded the mission. Together, you were efficient enough that adults called it impressive and never once called it sad.

Talia gave you your final orders in a private room before departure.

“Gotham will provoke him,” she said. You stood with your hands behind your back, eyes lowered. Damian was not present. That was intentional. “His father will attempt to change him. The city will soften his discipline. He will feel things he has been trained not to value. You will keep him safe from those feelings until he learns which are useful.”

There was a time you would have accepted that cleanly. By thirteen, something in you had begun to resist. Not openly. Never openly. But Gotham had already started to exist in your imagination as more than a mission site. Damian spoke of it with disdain, but there was always something under the disdain when he mentioned his father. A question he wanted to kill before it could hatch. You had begun to wonder whether feelings were dangerous because they weakened people, or because people who felt too much became harder to command.

You did not say that to Talia. You only bowed your head. “Yes.”

She touched your chin, tilting your face up. Her gaze was cool and assessing. “He trusts you.”

“No,” you said.

Talia smiled. “He trusts your presence. For Damian, that is close.”

You did not know what to do with the warmth that sentence left in your chest.

Then Talia said, “Do not mistake closeness for equality.”

And there it was. The blade beneath the silk.

You arrived in Gotham under a grey sky that looked heavy enough to fall.

Wayne Manor was nothing like the League. That was the first shock. Not because it was less dangerous. In some ways, it felt more dangerous because its softness had no obvious edges. The Manor was vast and old and full of ghosts that did not bother hiding. But it also had warm food. Windows that looked over gardens instead of training yards. A dog that followed Alfred Pennyworth with solemn devotion. A grandfatherly butler who looked at you once and knew too much.

Bruce Wayne looked at Damian like a man trying to identify a wound he had inherited too late. Damian looked at Bruce like a challenge he intended to win. You stood half a step behind Damian because that was where you had always stood: close enough to reach him, not close enough to imply he needed anyone.

Bruce’s eyes flicked to you. He knew immediately that you were not merely a companion. Batman always knew where the hidden weapons were.

“And you are?” he asked.

You gave your name.

Damian answered for you. “My partner.”

Bruce’s gaze sharpened.

Not servant. Not guard. Not handler.

Partner.

Damian seemed to realise what he had said only after he said it. His jaw tightened, daring anyone in the room to challenge the word.

Bruce did not. Alfred, however, looked briefly pleased.

That was how Gotham began teaching both of you treason. Not through rebellion. Not through some dramatic escape from everything you had known. Through small, unbearable corrections.

Alfred asked before touching your shoulder. Dick Grayson crouched to Damian’s eye level after a fight instead of standing over him, which made Damian threaten him with three separate injuries and then follow him around the next day like an offended shadow.

Bruce told you that you were allowed to eat whenever you were hungry, not only at assigned times. You did not believe him.

Then he proved it by leaving food where you and Damian could find it after training.

Tim Drake, exhausted and sharp-eyed, watched you calm Damian after a particularly brutal argument with Bruce and later asked, “Did he say yes?”

You blinked. “What?”

“To whatever you just did.”

You frowned at him.

Tim’s face had been pale in the Batcave light, eyes ringed with sleepless bruises, but his voice was steady. “Your ability. Did Damian agree to it?”

No one had asked you that before.

You looked over at Damian. He stood across the cave, arms folded, fury softened by the faint residue of your power. He was still angry, but less sharp. Easier. Safer for the room.

You had done that. You had always done that.

“He was angry,” you said.

Tim’s expression did not change. “That isn’t consent.”

The sentence lodged in you like glass.

You hated him for it for three days. Then you hated yourself for much longer.

Damian noticed the shift before anyone else. Of course he did.

He found you on the roof of the Manor at dusk, sitting beside a stone gargoyle with your knees drawn up, watching the grounds darken under evening mist. Gotham spread beyond the trees in the distance, all teeth and lights, and for the first time since arriving, you wondered what it would be like to walk into the city without a mission.

Damian climbed onto the roof beside you with the ease of someone who had never respected architecture as a boundary.

“You have been avoiding me,” he said.

You did not look at him. “No.”

“You are lying poorly.”

“I learned from you.”

His eyes narrowed. “I do not lie poorly.”

“You lie loudly.”

“That is not a category.”

“It is when you do it.”

He sat beside you, leaving more space than usual. That was new. Damian had always moved like space belonged to him by right. Now he seemed aware of the distance between your shoulders.

“You no longer use your ability when I am angry,” he said.

Your stomach tightened. “I thought you disliked it.”

“I do.”

“Then why are you asking?”

“Because you have stopped without explanation.”

You looked down at your hands. They were older now than they had been in Talia’s hall. Still young, yes, but no longer the hands of the child who had first reached for Damian on command and thought obedience was the same thing as purpose.

“Tim said something,” you admitted.

Damian’s face darkened on principle. “Drake says many things. Most are tedious.”

“He asked if you consented.”

The word sat between you. Damian went still.

You braced for anger. For pride. For dismissal.

Instead, he looked away.

The silence stretched so long you nearly filled it.

Then Damian said, “In the League, consent was irrelevant.”

“Yes.”

“They used your power as they used my blade.”

The accuracy of that hurt. “Yes.”

His jaw tightened. “That does not mean it should remain irrelevant.”

You looked at him then. Damian’s expression was hard, but not at you. Or not only at you. He stared out over the grounds like he could see every adult who had ever called his obedience strength.

“I did not understand that before,” he said.

“Neither did I.”

“You should have.”

The words struck, but not cruelly. Damian did not say it to wound. He said it because truth, once found, had to be held sharp.

“Yes,” you whispered. “I should have.”

His gaze flicked back to yours.

For the first time, he looked uncertain. That frightened you more than his anger ever had.

“I should have as well,” he said.

You swallowed.

Neither of you apologised then. Not properly. You were both still learning that apology was not weakness performed after failure, but a way of returning choice to the person harmed. Instead, Damian held out his hand between you, palm up, stiff as if he expected the gesture to be mocked by the roof tiles themselves.

You stared at it.

He looked profoundly irritated by his own vulnerability. “Do not make me regret this.”

“I was not doing anything.”

“You were looking.”

“It is a hand, Damian.”

“It is an offer.”

Your breath caught.

He looked away. “If you are uncertain whether you are permitted to use your ability, you will ask.”

“And if you are too angry to answer?”

“Then you will not.”

“What if you hurt someone?”

His jaw tightened. “Then I will be responsible for what I do.”

The sentence chilled you.

Not because he was wrong. Because it was the first time you understood how much responsibility he had been denied by people who claimed to be shaping him for greatness.

You placed your hand in his.

Not to calm him. Just to hold.

Damian’s fingers closed around yours, careful and awkward and very warm.

Your power stirred instinctively. You kept it inside.

His eyes flicked to you.

“I did not feel anything,” he said.

“No.”

“Good.”

But he did not let go.

Years moved strangely after that.

You and Damian grew up in Gotham and against Gotham, which was to say neither of you did it gracefully. He fought with Bruce. You fought with Bruce. Damian fought with you about fighting with Bruce because apparently hypocrisy was genetic. You both learned civilian clothes, public transport, school schedules, movie nights, galas, grief without immediate violence, and the strange humiliation of being asked what you wanted to eat instead of being handed rations.

Damian acquired animals the way other people acquired hobbies. Titus came first, then Alfred the Cat, then a sequence of creatures who were meant to be temporary and absolutely were not. You suspected Damian used animals as emotional intermediaries long before he admitted he had emotions requiring mediation. If you had a bad day, a cat appeared in your lap. If you overused your power helping a frightened civilian after a mission, Titus was commanded to sit on your feet with the solemn weight of a medical prescription. If you cried once, silently, in the barn after failing to calm a rescued horse that had been beaten too badly to trust hands, Damian entered without a word, sat beside you, and placed a baby goat against your side.

You looked at him through tears. “Is this your solution?”

He stood with his arms folded, trying very hard to look like someone who did not care whether the goat began chewing your sleeve. “She is small and warm.”

“That is not an answer.”

“It is an accurate assessment.”

“You brought me an emotional support goat.”

“You were distressed.”

“I am still distressed. Now I’m being eaten.”

“The goat finds your clothing comforting.”

You laughed then, unwilling and broken.

Damian looked away, but not before you saw relief move through him.

That was how he loved for years before either of you named it: practical, absurd, slightly imperious, and filtered through animals whenever direct tenderness threatened to kill him on sight.

You remained partners.

The word changed shape as you aged. At fifteen, it meant someone who knew your blind spots in combat and would insult them afterwards. At seventeen, it meant the person beside you on rooftops, shoulder to shoulder, watching Gotham’s lights pulse below like a living thing. At nineteen, it meant the one person Damian would allow to see him after nightmares from the League, though he insisted they were not nightmares but “memory irregularities,” which was such a Tim-adjacent phrase that you threatened to tell him.

At twenty-one, it meant something neither of you had language for because every available word felt too soft, too exposed, too likely to make the other person look away.

You loved Damian by then. You had probably loved him long before. Childhood had been survival, rivalry, shared conditioning, the terrible loyalty of two weapons stored in the same room. But as adults, as both of you became people in the spaces between missions, love arrived quietly and then behaved like it had always owned the place.

You loved the way he frowned when concentrating on delicate animal care, hands that could wield a sword with lethal grace becoming impossibly gentle around a bird’s broken wing. You loved the way he argued with paintings at galas under his breath. You loved that he remembered every tea you liked and still pretended Alfred had selected it. You loved his rare smiles, not because they were rare, but because he had fought so hard to keep anything in himself soft enough to produce them.

Damian, for his part, did not realise he loved you until you almost died.

Which was very dramatic of him. You would later point that out. He would deny it. Poorly.

The mission began with League defectors disappearing from Gotham.

They were not good people. That was important. Some had been children once, like you and Damian, raised into violence before they could name themselves. Others had been adults who chose cruelty and later found it less profitable than regret. All of them had fled something. All of them were vanishing from safehouses that should have been secure, leaving behind bloodless rooms and the faint scent of incense used in old League rites.

Bruce wanted to handle it quietly. Damian wanted to handle it violently. You wanted everyone to stop using “handle” when they meant “control the consequences of trauma before they inconvenience the mission.”

This, naturally, led to an argument in the Cave.

“They are being hunted,” Damian said, standing before the computer with his arms crossed and fury held rigid in every line of him. At twenty-one, he had grown into his height and his father’s silence, but his anger remained entirely his own: sharp, bright, and too honest for the room. “Delay will cost lives.”

“Charging in without knowing who is taking them will cost more,” Bruce said.

“You mean it will cost people you have deemed strategically useful.”

Bruce’s face tightened. “Damian.”

You leaned against the medbay railing, arms folded. “He is not wrong.”

Bruce looked at you. Damian looked at you too, but his expression carried the faint surprise he always had when you agreed with him publicly, as if after years of partnership he still expected betrayal from every corner of every room.

You softened before you could stop yourself. He looked away first.

Tim, from the computer, coughed in a way that sounded suspiciously like amusement.

Damian glared at him. “Do you require medical assistance, Drake?”

“No, I’m good.”

“Then be silent.”

“Great teamwork, everyone.”

The case led to an abandoned monastery north of the city, a place Gotham had not swallowed only because it sat beyond the reach of its worst habits. Snow clung to the stone steps. Black trees surrounded the grounds, their branches thin and clawlike against the moon. The air smelled wrong before you crossed the outer wall: incense, iron, and the cold, bitter residue of old conditioning.

Damian felt it too. He stopped beside you beneath the shadow of a broken archway, one gloved hand near his sword.

“This place is designed to provoke memory,” he said.

You looked at him. “League?”

“Older.”

That meant worse.

You reached out—not with power, only with your hand—and touched his sleeve. “Do you want me close?”

His jaw shifted. There was a time he would have considered the question insulting. Now he only said, “Yes.”

The word warmed you more than your power ever could.

You moved together through the monastery as you had in childhood, but everything was different now. The rhythm remained: Damian forward, you angled behind and to the left, both of you reading each shift of shadow, each breath of stone, each space too quiet to be empty. But where once you had been a tool assigned to his control, now every movement was chosen. You did not enter his emotional field without permission. He did not command your power like a tactical resource. You asked. He answered. The partnership had become honest in the years it took to name the old dishonesty.

Then the chanting started.

It came from below. Not loud. Not dramatic. A low murmur moving through the stone, syllables in an old League dialect you had not heard since childhood. Your body reacted before thought did, spine stiffening, breath narrowing. Beside you, Damian went utterly still.

“Do not listen,” he said.

His voice was flat. Too flat.

“Damian.”

“I am fine.”

“Liar.”

His mouth twitched, but it did not last.

The chanting deepened.

A memory slammed through you—not yours exactly, not his, but the shared architecture of where you had been raised. Training halls. Cold floors. Adults saying again. Blood wiped from children’s mouths. Talia’s voice telling you that closeness was not equality. Damian at eight years old glaring at you because you had calmed him against his will and he had hated the relief almost as much as the violation.

Your power stirred anxiously. You kept it locked down.

Damian’s breathing changed.

“Do you want help?” you asked softly.

“No.”

You nodded once. “Okay.”

He looked at you then, and something flickered across his face. Trust, perhaps. Or fear of what trust made possible.

You continued downward. The chamber beneath the monastery had once been used for prayer. Now it had been turned into something uglier. The missing defectors knelt in a circle around a shallow pit filled with black water. Their eyes were open but unfocused, mouths moving with the chant. At the far end of the chamber stood a woman in League robes, older than either of you but not old enough to have trained Damian directly. Her face was painted with symbols of loyalty and severance.

Damian inhaled sharply. You felt recognition move through him like a blade sliding free.

“Who is she?” you whispered.

“A remnant,” he said. “My grandfather’s loyalist. Safiya.”

Safiya smiled.

“Prince,” she said.

Damian’s face closed.

You hated the title in her mouth. It did not sound like respect. It sounded like ownership dusted off and presented as heritage.

“And the keeper,” Safiya continued, eyes moving to you. “Still at his side. How touching. How predictable.”

Your hand curled.

Damian stepped forward. “Release them.”

Safiya laughed softly. “You sound like your father when you command mercy. It does not suit you.”

Damian’s jaw tightened.

The chanting rose. The defectors began to shake. You felt the emotional field in the room twist, not natural panic but conditioned obedience being pulled open. The words were old triggers. Not one command, but many. Loyalty. Shame. Return. Submit. Bleed. The room was a machine built from memory, and every survivor inside it was being dragged back toward the shape their captors had carved into them.

Then the chant changed.

Your blood went cold. The new phrase was one you knew. So did Damian.

You had heard it in training as children, spoken when Damian’s anger became too unruly and your handlers wanted him brought under control. The phrase did not belong to you, not truly, but it had always preceded your use of power on him. Calm the heir. Still the blade. Preserve the mission.

Safiya’s smile widened.

“They know,” she said to Damian. “They remember what they were made for.”

Damian’s eyes snapped to you.

You shook your head once. “No.”

The chanting struck him. Not magically, not fully, but psychologically, brutally. It found the old pathways. The child trained to obey. The heir trained to endure. The boy whose emotions had been managed by everyone around him until he learned to seal them away before anyone else could touch them.

Damian staggered.

You moved toward him.

He lifted one hand. “Do not.”

You stopped so hard it hurt.

His breathing was ragged. His eyes were bright with fury and memory, but he was still there. Still choosing. Still fighting in the only way that mattered.

Safiya tilted her head. “He will break before he asks.”

You looked at her. The old you would have reached for Damian because someone had commanded it. The frightened you would have reached because you could not bear to watch him suffer. The person you had become stood still and let Damian own his pain.

“Damian,” you said, voice shaking but clear, “I am here. I will not touch it unless you ask.”

His eyes closed.

The chanting battered the chamber. A defector screamed. Safiya’s hand moved toward a blade. Damian’s hand shook around his sword.

Then he opened his eyes.

“Not me,” he said.

You blinked. 

His gaze moved past you to the defectors kneeling around the pit. “Help them.”

Your heart twisted. “Damian—”

“I can endure this,” he said through clenched teeth. “They cannot.”

The old partnership would have obeyed the mission. The new one understood the cost.

You nodded.

Then you opened your power.

Not toward Damian. Toward the circle.

Warmth moved from you in a wide, aching wave, flowing over the kneeling defectors, through the chant, into the conditioned terror and shame clawing at their nervous systems. You asked without words because some of them had no access to language inside the trigger. You offered. You did not command. You made a room inside the compulsion where choice could stand again.

One by one, the defectors stopped chanting. One by one, they began to cry.

Safiya’s expression twisted. “You waste it.”

“No,” you said, cold sweat breaking along your skin. “I return it.”

Damian moved. He hit Safiya like judgment given a body. Not rage unchecked. Not conditioning. Not the League’s perfect blade. Damian, choosing violence with clarity, which was far more frightening. Their fight cut across the chamber in flashes of steel and shadow. You held the emotional field around the defectors as they crawled back from the pit, shaking and sobbing. The power drained you fast. Too fast. The chamber was heavy with old terror, and every life you held steady pulled warmth from your bones.

Damian disarmed Safiya. She fell hard against the stone. He stood above her, sword at her throat.

“Do it,” she hissed. “Prove you are still ours.”

The chamber went silent.

You were on your knees now, one hand braced against the freezing floor, power flickering at the edges. You felt Damian’s anger rise, terrible and clean. You felt the old wound beneath it. You felt the child in him who had been told mercy was weakness and the man who had spent years deciding that did not make it true.

You did not reach for him. You trusted him.

Damian’s blade trembled once. Then he lowered it.

“No,” he said. “I am mine.”

Safiya’s face changed.

Not fear. Defeat.

It should have ended there. Naturally, it did not, because Gotham and its surrounding cursed architecture had no respect for emotional climaxes.

Safiya’s hand slammed against a hidden trigger in the stone.

The pit ignited green. Not Lazarus, not exactly, but something related, something stolen and altered and spiritually rancid. The defectors screamed as the chamber shook. Stone cracked overhead. Damian turned toward you.

You saw the ceiling give before he did.

There was no time for strategy. No time for consent. No time for any ethical shape clean enough to survive impact.

You threw your power wide.

Not at Damian’s emotions. At everything. The room. The defectors. The terror. The stampede that would have crushed half of them. The panic that would have frozen the rest. You gave every piece of warmth you had left to make the chamber survivable for the seconds it needed to be survived. People moved. Breathed. Crawled. Chose.

Damian reached you just as the first stones fell.

“Partner!” he shouted.

It was not a command. It was terror.

You smiled at him, which was rude of you, really. Very inconsiderate. Dramatically timed. He would later be furious about it.

Then the ceiling came down between you.

You woke to arguing. This was not unusual. In your life, waking to arguing usually meant you were alive and surrounded by Waynes, which were closely related conditions.

“You should have extracted them before the chamber destabilised,” Bruce was saying somewhere nearby, voice low and grim.

“I was occupied preventing an execution,” Damian snapped.

“You were triggered.”

“I remained in control.”

“You almost—”

“I did not.”

“Enough,” Alfred said.

The silence that followed was immediate. Powerful man, Alfred Pennyworth.

You opened your eyes.

The medbay ceiling of the Cave stared back at you, bright and unpleasant. Your whole body felt scraped empty, like someone had taken your bones out, filled the spaces with snow, and put everything back slightly wrong. A blanket covered you. An IV ran into your arm. Titus lay beside the cot with his head on your calf, which meant Damian had either ordered medical support or prescribed dog again.

You turned your head.

Damian sat beside you. He looked wrecked. Not visibly, perhaps, to anyone who did not know him. His posture remained straight. His clothes were clean. Someone had bandaged a cut along his temple. But his face had the rigid stillness of a man holding himself together with wire.

When he saw you awake, that wire nearly snapped.

“You are an idiot,” he said.

Your throat was dry. “Good morning to you too.”

“It is evening.”

“Then I’ve been efficient.”

His eyes narrowed. “Do not make jokes.”

“Have we met?”

Titus lifted his head and thumped his tail once.

Damian glared at the dog. “Do not encourage them.”

You smiled faintly, then winced because even that hurt.

Damian’s expression shifted immediately. “Do not move.”

“You’re very commanding for someone who once got emotionally outmanoeuvred by a baby goat.”

“That goat was a menace.”

“She was three weeks old.”

“She had intent.”

A laugh scraped out of you, weak and painful.

Damian looked away.

That was when you noticed his hands. They were shaking.

Barely. But they were.

You looked at them, then at his face. “Damian.”

“No.”

“I haven’t asked anything.”

“You are about to ask if I am all right.”

“Are you?”

“No.”

The answer came so quickly it stole the air from you.

Damian looked equally shocked by it.

Bruce, Alfred, and everyone else had vanished at some point. Or perhaps Alfred had removed them with eyebrow-based authority. Either way, the medbay was quiet now except for the hum of machines and Titus’s breathing.

Damian stared at the floor.

“I thought you were dead,” he said.

The words were flat. Too flat. You had known Damian since childhood. You had watched him bleed, rage, train, fail, learn, unlearn, rebuild. You had seen him face assassins, monsters, family dinners, and therapy-adjacent conversations with equal hostility. But you had rarely heard him sound young.

He sounded young then.

Your chest ached. “I’m not.”

“I am aware.”

“You sound angry about it.”

“I am angry that you made it uncertain.”

You tried to shift closer. Pain sparked through your ribs. Damian’s hand moved toward you, then stopped in midair.

Permission. Even now. Even terrified.

You could have cried.

“You can touch me,” you whispered.

His hand settled around yours with exquisite care.

No power moved between you. Damian looked at your joined hands like he was making sure.

Then he said, “When the ceiling fell, I could not reach you.”

“I know.”

“I have always been able to reach you.”

Your throat tightened.

That was true in ways neither of you had ever named. On training floors. In smoke-filled stairwells. On Gotham rooftops. Across years of anger, obedience, rebellion, and the slow, painful education of becoming people instead of weapons. Damian had always known where you were in a fight. You had always known how close you could stand before his anger became too much or not enough. Even when you argued, even when you hurt each other, even when you had to relearn the ethics of every touch, you had been reachable.

The ceiling falling between you had broken a rule older than either of you understood.

“I’m here now,” you said.

His grip tightened. “Yes.”

Silence.

Then, because you were exhausted and therefore foolishly brave, you said, “You called me partner.”

His eyes snapped to yours. “You are my partner.”

“I know.”

“In combat.”

“I know.”

“In missions.”

“I know.”

“In—” He stopped.

There it was. The thing in the room. The word that had followed you from childhood like a shadow and changed shape while neither of you were looking.

Damian released a slow breath. “When I believed you dead, I did not think of the mission.” You went still. “I did not think of Father. Or the League. Or the defectors. Or whether Safiya had escaped.” His voice lowered. “I thought only that there would be no world in which I could accept your absence.”

Your heart thudded once, hard.

Damian looked furious with himself for every word and determined to say them anyway. It was perhaps the bravest you had ever seen him.

“You have been beside me since before I understood what choice meant,” he said. “At first, because you were placed there. Then, because our training demanded it. Then, because habit made it easier not to question.” His thumb moved, barely, against your knuckles. “But somewhere, without my permission and therefore quite rudely, you became the person I would choose in every life where choice is offered to me.”

Your eyes burned. “Damian.”

“I am not finished.”

Of course not.

You nodded, tears slipping quietly down your face.

“I believed partnership meant efficiency,” he said. “Compatibility in combat. Shared objectives. Mutual reliance. I did not understand why your absence from a room altered its structure. Why your disapproval troubled me more than Father’s. Why I found myself bringing you animals when words failed, or learning your tea preferences, or delaying patrol by thirteen minutes because you once said the sunset from the east gargoyle was tolerable.”

“You counted the minutes?”

“I count many things.”

“Romantic.”

His mouth twitched despite himself.

Then his expression became painfully open.

“I love you,” Damian said.

The words did not arrive soft.

They arrived like a blade laid down. A surrender, not to defeat, but to truth.

You cried harder, which seemed to alarm him.

“I have upset you.”

“No,” you said, laughing through it. “No, you emotionally constipated menace, I love you too.”

His face went very still.

Then all at once, he looked breathless. “You do?”

“I have loved you for years.”

“Years.”

“Yes.”

His brows drew together. “That is an unreasonable amount of time to conceal relevant information.”

You laughed so hard your ribs protested. “Ow. Do not make me laugh.”

“You are the one who withheld intelligence.”

“I was in love with you, Damian, not filing a mission report.”

“One can be both.”

“You’re impossible.”

“And yet.”

“And yet,” you whispered.

He looked at your mouth then. Not subtle. Damian had never been good at wanting quietly once he realised wanting was allowed.

Your breath caught.

“May I kiss you?” he asked.

You smiled through tears. “You’re asking?”

His expression sobered. “Always.”

That broke something soft and sacred in you.

“Yes,” you whispered. “You may.”

Damian leaned in slowly, as if every inch mattered because every inch was chosen. His free hand rose to your cheek, stopped just before touching, and waited until you nodded. Then his fingers settled against your skin, warm and careful. The kiss itself was softer than anyone would have believed of him, except you. You knew his softness. You had watched him learn it like a forbidden language, awkward syllable by awkward syllable, until it became something he could speak with hands, animals, tea, silence, and now his mouth against yours.

No power moved between you. None was needed.

When he pulled back, his forehead rested against yours.

“I did not feel anything,” he murmured.

You smiled. “Rude.”

His eyes opened, alarmed. “I meant your ability.”

“I know.”

His expression flattened. “You are intolerable.”

“You love me.”

“Yes,” he said, with such immediate certainty that your smile trembled. “I do.”

The aftermath took time.

Of course it did. Neither of you had been raised to believe healing could be gentle. The League had taught correction. Gotham taught consequence. Love, you learned, taught repetition. Damian did not become soft in the way poets made softness sound easy. He remained sharp, proud, exacting, occasionally insufferable, and deeply committed to pretending he did not enjoy family game night. You did not become perfectly ethical, perfectly healed, perfectly free of the instinct to comfort first and ask later when fear got too loud. But you both practised.

That was the word neither of you had been given as children.

Practice.

Damian practised asking for help before rage turned his body into a locked room. You practised letting him be angry without reaching for the warmth inside you like a leash made of good intentions. He practised saying, “I am afraid,” with the expression of a man volunteering for execution. You practised saying, “I cannot help tonight,” and believing that refusal did not make you useless.

Sometimes he asked for your power.

Not often. Never casually.

The first time after the monastery, he stood in your doorway after a nightmare, barefoot and furious with himself, Alfred the Cat tucked under one arm like a hostage.

“I do not forgive the League for making this difficult,” he said.

You sat up in bed, instantly awake. “That is very fair.”

“I do not wish to be alone.”

You softened. “Do you want comfort or company?”

His jaw worked.

“Company first,” he said.

So you made space.

He sat beside you with the cat between you like a chaperone from hell. You did not touch his emotions. You did not reach for his fear. You talked until his breathing evened. You sat in silence until silence stopped feeling like abandonment.

Later, when dawn began to grey the windows, he said, “Now.”

You looked at him.

He stared at the floor. “If you are willing.”

Your throat tightened. “Tell me what you want.”

“Not peace,” he said. “Peace would be dishonest.”

You waited.

“Only enough warmth that the memory knows it is not the present.”

You held out your hand. He took it. You let your power move in a careful thread, exactly as asked. Not to erase. Not to correct. Not to make him easier. Only to help the part of him still trapped in old halls remember that he was in Gotham now, in your room, with a cat purring like an engine between you and morning arriving despite everything.

After a few seconds, he said, “Enough.”

You stopped.

Damian’s fingers remained around yours.

“That was acceptable,” he said.

You smiled. “High praise.”

“It was.”

“I know.”

He looked at you then, and there was something almost shy beneath the imperious tilt of his chin. “You may kiss me.”

You laughed. “May I?”

“I am offering.”

“You are very generous.”

“Do not be tiresome.”

You kissed him. He kissed back with a warmth no power had made.

Years ago, Talia had placed you beside Damian as one might give a prince a blade.

She had been wrong. You were not his blade. He was not your mission.

The League had made you weapons and called it destiny. Gotham had made you survivors and called it Tuesday. But somewhere between childhood orders and adult choices, between old violations and new consent, between every time one of you said partner and meant something more than survival, you had become people who could choose each other without command.

One evening months later, you found Damian in the barn with Titus, Alfred the Cat, two recovering pigeons, a three-legged fox, and the baby goat, now larger and somehow more judgmental.

“This is becoming excessive,” you said from the doorway.

Damian looked up from bandaging the fox’s paw. “They require care.”

“You have an army.”

“I have standards.”

“You have a goat eating your shoelace.”

He glanced down. The goat was, indeed, eating his shoelace. “She is expressing affection.”

“She is consuming you.”

“Love requires sacrifice.”

You stared at him. He looked back, perfectly serious for exactly three seconds before the corner of his mouth betrayed him.

Your heart filled so abruptly it hurt.

No power. No mission. No old command curling around your ribs.

Just Damian, older now, still sharp and still healing, sitting among rescued creatures in the warm hay-gold light of evening. Just you, leaning against the doorway, wanted for reasons that had nothing to do with usefulness. Just the word partner between you, no longer a chain or assignment or tactical designation.

A choice.

Damian held out one hand. You crossed the barn and took it.

His thumb brushed your knuckles.

“Are you well?” he asked.

The question was simple. It had taken both of you years to learn how to ask it.

You looked at him, then at the animals, then at the fading light beyond the open doors.

“I think so,” you said.

Damian studied you carefully. Then he nodded, accepting the answer not because it was complete, but because it was yours.

“Good,” he said. “Sit. The goat has missed you.”

“The goat has missed my sleeves.”

“She is complex.”

“She is a menace.”

“She is family.”

You sat beside him, laughing softly, and the goat immediately began chewing the hem of your shirt.

Damian looked smug.

You bumped his shoulder with yours.

He leaned back.

Only slightly. Only enough.

Outside, Gotham waited with all its teeth and shadows. The world was not fixed. Neither were you. Neither was Damian. But the barn was warm, and his hand was in yours, and no one had ordered either of you to stay.

You stayed anyway.

When you moved into the building, the landlord told you the neighbour in 4B was “quiet.” That was technically true in the same way a ghost was quiet. The apartment beside yours did not host parties, arguments, loud music, or television laughter. It did not smell of cooking except on rare, miraculous evenings when something burnt and someone muttered, “How do you burn soup?” with such genuine betrayal that you had to cover your mouth to keep from laughing. It was quiet, yes, but not empty. There were nights when the air itself seemed to vibrate through the shared bedroom wall, not with sound but with tension: the anxious static of someone whose mind never slept even when the body begged for mercy.

You knew that feeling better than you wanted to. Your power had always made you too aware of other people’s storms.

It was not telepathy. You did not hear thoughts. You did not read memories. You could not look at someone and know the names of their ghosts. What you felt was less exact and more intimate: panic like metal under the tongue, grief like cold water rising, rage like a match struck in a closed room. Pain had a weather system, and your body had been born—no, made—to answer it.

The first time your power manifested, you had been young and alone and wishing so hard for someone to come comfort you that the wish became a physical ache. No one came. Instead, an injured bird had fallen from the broken gutter above your hiding place, all frantic wings and terror, and you had reached for it because it was shaking the same way you were. You remembered whispering, “It’s okay,” even though nothing was okay, and feeling something inside your chest open like a door in a burning house.

The bird had gone still in your hands.

Not dead. Safe.

After that, you could give it away. Comfort. Warmth. The feeling that the next minute might be survivable. You could soothe animals, calm children, soften panic attacks, ease fury enough that choice could return. You could make someone feel, briefly, like the world had not abandoned them completely.

You could not do it for yourself. Of course not. That would have made the universe too kind, and Gotham had a strict policy against that.

You tried not to use your power without asking. You really did. Consent mattered. You knew too well how quickly comfort could become control if offered by someone who decided they knew better than the person hurting. So you asked. You asked frightened children if you could sit beside them. You asked trembling animals with your stillness when you could not use words. You asked adults in crisis if they wanted help calming down. You built your life around the ethics of not becoming another person’s locked door.

Then there was the neighbour in 4B.

At first, you did not mean to help him. You only felt him through the wall.

The shared wall between your bedrooms was thin in the humiliating way old Gotham apartments always were, as if the architect had believed privacy was a luxury and emotional boundaries were for people with higher rent. Your bed sat against one side. His, you assumed from the pattern of movement and the dull thump of what sounded like a body collapsing onto a mattress at night, sat against the other. That wall became a strange kind of witness. It heard his pacing. It heard your kettle. It heard the nights you woke from dreams you could not soothe and the nights he did not sleep at all.

The first time you let your power drift through it, he had been awake for thirty-six hours.

You did not know that for certain then, but you felt it. The exhaustion coming from his apartment was not ordinary tiredness. It was bright and sharp and over-caffeinated, a mind held open by force, running too hot, too fast, too long. You were lying in bed, staring at the ceiling, listening to the faint tap of his keyboard through the wall. Tap tap tap. Pause. Tap tap tap tap. A mug set down too hard. A chair rolling back. Footsteps. More typing.

Then a sound you did not like. Not a sob. Not even close.

A breath catching and being swallowed.

Your power stirred.

You pressed your palm to the wall before you could think better of it.

“Hey,” you whispered, though he could not hear you. “You can rest. Just for a minute.”

Warmth moved out of you softly, more like steam than sunlight. You did not push. You did not reach for his mind. You did not wrap yourself around his fear. You only let comfort collect against the wall and seep through the cracks of the building, a quiet atmosphere rather than a command. The typing slowed. Stopped. A chair creaked. For a long moment, there was nothing.

Then, on the other side of the wall, you heard the mattress shift.

The neighbour in 4B slept.

You told yourself it was coincidence. That became the first lie.

You met him properly in the mailroom two days later.

He was standing in front of the dented metal mailboxes with an armful of envelopes, two coffees balanced precariously in one hand, and the haunted expression of a man who had not expected paper to betray him before noon. He was younger than you had imagined from the heaviness of his nights. Early twenties, maybe. Dark hair falling into tired blue eyes, pale skin, sharp cheekbones, a bruise half-hidden near his jaw under a badly tied scarf. He wore a soft-looking hoodie under a coat that probably cost more than your sofa and shoes that had seen rooftops, rain, or both.

A stack of mail slid from his elbow.

You caught it on instinct.

One of the coffee cups tilted dangerously.

He made a small, betrayed noise. “No, no, no—”

You caught that too, mostly.

A thin line of coffee splashed across your sleeve. The two of you stared at it.

He looked horrified. “I’m so sorry.”

You looked down at the brown stain spreading over your wrist. “Well. I was wondering how to make this jumper worse.”

His mouth opened, then closed, then opened again. “I’ll pay for dry cleaning.”

“It’s cotton.”

“I’ll pay for cotton cleaning.”

“That is not a thing.”

“I’ll invent it.”

His face was so earnest and sleep-deprived that you laughed before you could stop yourself.

Something in him changed at the sound. Not obviously. Not in a grand romantic way, no violins, no slow-motion mail fluttering to the floor. But the tension in his shoulders dropped by half an inch, and the panic in his eyes softened into something almost shy.

“I’m Tim,” he said. You gave him your name. Recognition flickered. “You’re 4A.”

“And you’re 4B.”

“Sorry about the noise.”

You blinked. “What noise?”

He shifted the mail in his arms, suddenly awkward. “I keep weird hours.”

“You are very quiet for someone with weird hours.”

“That sounds like something a ghost gets reviewed for online.”

“Four stars,” you said. “Occasional kettle activity. Minimal haunting. Good neighbour.”

His smile arrived small and startled, like it had taken a wrong turn on the way to someone else’s face. You liked it immediately, which was inconvenient.

Tim looked down at the coffee stain again. “Seriously, I’m sorry.”

“Seriously, it’s fine.”

“You sure?”

“Tim,” you said, testing his name and pretending it did not feel sweet in your mouth. “It’s coffee. I live in Gotham. I’ve been through worse before breakfast.”

His smile thinned at the edges, and you felt it then, the shape of him beneath the surface. Pain and exhaustion and a mind still moving too quickly under every word. He was not just tired. He was holding himself upright by habit, caffeine, and the sort of stubbornness that probably needed professional intervention or a brick.

“You should keep one of those,” you said, nodding toward the coffees.

“I was planning to keep both.”

“That tracks.”

He huffed something almost like a laugh.

You handed him the rescued mail. Your fingers brushed.

Your power stirred again. Tim did not seem to notice. You did. You pulled your hand back quickly and tucked it into your sleeve.

“Try sleeping sometime,” you said, aiming for lightness.

His eyes sharpened. “What makes you think I don’t?”

“You look like your soul has been buffering for a decade.”

That startled a real laugh out of him. It was quiet, a little rough, and gone too fast.

“Okay,” he said. “That was rude.”

“That was neighbourly concern.”

“You always insult people you’re concerned about?”

“Only when they have visible coffee dependency.”

Tim looked at the two cups in his hand. “This is evidence obtained without a warrant.”

“I live next door. I’m the warrant.”

He smiled again. This time, you smiled back.

After that, Tim became a person rather than a symptom.

Not all at once. He did not suddenly become easy to know. Tim Drake had the energy of someone who kept half his personality in encrypted folders and the other half under a coffee cup. But he appeared more often in the shared spaces of the building after that: the mailroom, the stairwell, the tiny laundry room in the basement where the dryer ate socks with criminal intent. He wore hoodies more than suits, carried his laptop like an external organ, and always looked faintly surprised when anyone cared whether he had eaten.

You learned that he lived in the apartment only on certain days. At least, that was how it seemed. Mondays, sometimes. Thursdays, often. Weekends rarely. Some nights, he arrived near dawn, slept for three hours, showered, changed, and vanished again. Other weeks, his apartment stayed dark and still, and you found yourself listening for him in ways that made you feel both fond and pathetic.

“Do you actually live here?” you asked one evening in the laundry room, where Tim was staring at a washing machine as if it had personally presented him with a riddle.

He looked over. “What?”

“Your apartment. Is it a home, or is it where you store clean socks and bad decisions?”

His expression flickered. “That is… weirdly specific.”

“I have ears. The walls are thin. Also, you once dropped a stack of what sounded like twelve laptops at four in the morning.”

“It was three laptops.”

“Deeply normal correction.”

He leaned one shoulder against the dryer, arms folding. He looked better than the day in the mailroom but still tired in the way the ocean was wet: fundamentally, relentlessly, almost artistically. “It’s a place I use when work runs late.”

“Work.”

“Yes.”

“What kind of work requires three laptops, possible roof gravel on your shoes, and showering at five in the morning?”

“Consulting.”

You stared at him. He stared back.

“That is the worst lie I’ve ever heard,” you said.

“It’s technically true.”

“Ah, the rich man’s favourite genre.”

His mouth twitched. “You think I’m rich?”

“You own a coat that looks like it has opinions about tax brackets.”

“That coat was a gift.”

“From another coat?”

He laughed then, properly, head tipping back just a little. The sound filled the basement laundry room and made the flickering fluorescent light seem less hostile.

Your chest warmed with something that was not your power.

That became the dangerous part. The more you knew him, the harder it was to tell where compassion ended and wanting began.

Tim had habits that worried you. He drank coffee like it was load-bearing. He forgot meals and then looked confused when his hands shook. He fell asleep sitting upright in the laundry room once, chin dropping toward his chest with his laptop still open on his knees. You had watched him for thirty full seconds, torn between concern and the ethical problem of taking a photo for evidence. Eventually, you crouched in front of him and touched his knee lightly.

“Tim.”

He woke like someone had fired a gun. His hand snapped toward his pocket, eyes wide and unseeing for one terrible second. Then he recognised you. His whole body went still.

“Sorry,” he said quickly. “Sorry. I didn’t—”

“It’s okay.”

“I fell asleep?”

“No, you entered a very brief coma in front of the fabric softener.”

He looked at the laptop on his knees, then at the washer, then at you. “How long?”

“Long enough for me to consider drawing a moustache on you.”

“You didn’t.”

“I am a merciful neighbour.”

“Debatable.”

You sat back on your heels, studying him. “When was the last time you slept in a bed?”

Tim opened his mouth. Closed it.

“That answers that.”

“I sleep.”

“Do you?”

“Yes.”

“Do you sleep horizontally?”

“That feels like moving the goalposts.”

“Tim.”

The way you said his name made his face soften and close at the same time. You saw him almost answer honestly. Then the shutters came down.

“I’m fine,” he said.

There were few phrases in the English language more haunted than “I’m fine” from someone who clearly was not.

You wanted to reach for him.

You did not. Not there. Not with him awake and looking at you like honesty was a door he could not afford to open.

Instead, you stood and held out a hand. “Come on.”

Suspicion entered his eyes. “Where?”

“My apartment.”

“Why?”

“You are going to eat soup.”

“I have food.”

“Energy drinks don’t count.”

“They have calories.”

“I’m begging you to hear yourself.”

He looked like he wanted to argue. He also looked like standing up might require negotiation with several major organs. After a second, he took your hand.

Your power stirred at the contact, called by the deep exhaustion in him. You pulled him up and let go immediately.

Tim noticed. His brows drew together. “What?”

“Nothing,” you said too quickly.

He did not believe you. But he followed you upstairs anyway.

That night became the first of many almost-domestic accidents.

Tim sat at your tiny kitchen table with his laptop open while you heated soup on the stove. He claimed he needed to finish one thing. He finished seven things, answered three emails, wrote what looked like code, muttered “That’s impossible,” then immediately disproved himself. You put a bowl in front of him, and he looked at it like someone had handed him a relic.

“Eat,” you said.

“I am.”

“You’re staring.”

“I’m processing.”

“It’s soup, not a hostage negotiation.”

“You don’t know that.”

You leaned over and closed his laptop.

Tim made a sound of genuine distress. “Hey.”

“Soup first. Existential tech crisis later.”

“That laptop is encrypted.”

“Good. It can emotionally support itself for ten minutes.”

He glared at you. You glared back. Then, with all the reluctance of a man being dragged toward self-preservation by force, Tim picked up his spoon.

He ate the whole bowl. You pretended not to be pleased. He pretended not to notice you pretending.

That was the rhythm the two of you found. Teasing as a doorway. Care disguised as inconvenience. Concern wrapped in sarcasm because direct tenderness made both of you weird in different directions.

Tim began knocking on your door when he “accidentally ordered too much takeout,” which was a lie so transparent it deserved a window display. You started keeping extra coffee in your cupboard and then, after watching his hands tremble one too many times, decaf that you hid like contraband. He fixed your router after it died during a storm, then upgraded your security “because your lock is a suggestion.” You watered his one sad windowsill plant when he vanished for days, though you were not sure whether the plant was alive or merely committed to the bit.

He started coming home earlier on Thursdays. You did not comment.

He started smiling when he heard your door open in the hall. You definitely did not comment.

You started listening for him at night. That, unfortunately, was between you and the wall.

The wall became your secret.

At first, it had been occasional. A little warmth when his panic pressed too hard against the plaster. A gentle field when his pacing had gone on for hours. But as your friendship deepened, so did your awareness of him. You knew the cadence of his exhaustion. The faint thump of shoes being kicked off. The muttered curses when code refused to work. The nights when he collapsed into bed and still did not sleep because his mind kept running laps around whatever horrors his “consulting” refused to name.

You told yourself you were not touching him. Not really. You were creating an atmosphere. A safer room. A gentler edge around the night. He did not know, yes, but he was not being forced. He could still wake. Still dream. Still choose. You were only helping his body remember how to do what it needed anyway.

The lies got prettier every time you repeated them.

One night, the rain was hard enough to blur the city into silver shadows outside your window. Tim had come home after four days gone. You heard him through the wall before you saw any light under his door: the lock, the stumble, the soft curse as something hit the floor. His pain arrived next, sharp enough that you sat upright in bed.

Not just exhaustion. Fear.

No, not fear.

Aftershock.

You pressed your palm to the wall.

“Tim?” you whispered, though there was no way he could hear.

On the other side, there was a muffled sound, almost a laugh and almost a sob. Then silence.

Your power rose immediately, bright and aching. You held it back for one full second. Two. Long enough for guilt to speak. Long enough for the part of you that knew better to say, You should ask. You should knock. You should let him choose.

Then you imagined him opening the door with that terrible practised smile and saying he was fine. You imagined leaving him alone with whatever had followed him home.

You let the warmth through. Slowly. Carefully. You pressed your forehead to the wall and fed comfort into the space between your rooms. It moved like lamplight under a door. Gentle. Patient. A hand not touching, a voice not speaking, an impossible softness blooming in his dark apartment.

For a while, nothing happened.

Then you heard Tim inhale. The mattress creaked. A minute later, his breathing evened out.

You stayed with your palm against the wall until he slept.

The next morning, you found him in the hallway with damp hair, a hoodie, and the soft confusion of someone who had woken up rested and did not know who to blame.

“You look alive,” you said.

He narrowed his eyes. “Suspicious phrasing.”

“Accurate phrasing.”

“I slept ten hours.”

You tried to look surprised. “Wow.”

“Ten,” he repeated, like the number had personally betrayed his brand. “I didn’t even wake up at four.”

“Tragic. Think of all the emails you didn’t send.”

“I know.”

“I was joking.”

“I wasn’t.”

You shook your head and reached up, without thinking, to smooth a damp curl away from his forehead.

The moment your fingers touched his hair, Tim went still.

Not uncomfortable. Not exactly. Startled.

Your power did not move. You made sure of it. The touch was only a touch, your hand lingering a second too long before you remembered yourself and stepped back.

“Sorry,” you said.

Tim’s face had gone faintly pink. “It’s okay.”

You smiled awkwardly. “Hair emergency.”

“Right.”

“Could have been fatal.”

“Obviously.”

Neither of you moved.

His eyes flicked to your mouth. Your heart did something extremely embarrassing inside your chest.

Then the elevator dinged, and Mrs Alvarez from 3C stepped out with a grocery trolley and a pointed look that suggested she had just witnessed something spiritually indecent.

Tim stepped back too quickly. You nearly walked into your own door.

Very smooth. Oscar-worthy. 

Crushing on Tim Drake was not like falling. It was like realising you had been walking toward an edge for weeks and mistaking the view for safety.

It was the way he remembered things you said once and treated them like data worth preserving. The way he brought you a pastry from a bakery across town because you had mentioned missing the ones near your old apartment. The way he listened with his whole strange, overworked brain when you talked about your job, your neighbours, the feral cat behind the building that you were definitely not adopting even though it had a name now. The way he looked at you sometimes when he thought you were not paying attention, soft and puzzled, as if you were a problem he wanted to solve and a miracle he did not want to reduce to mechanics.

It was the way he was still hiding something.

That should have stopped you. It did not.

You knew there were secrets in him. You knew “consulting” did not explain the bruises, the hours, the tension, the way his eyes tracked exits automatically whenever you took him anywhere public. You knew there were days he came home carrying blood that did not belong to office work and disappearances that did not belong to any normal schedule. You did not push because Gotham was full of people with locked doors inside them, and because you had locked doors too. Your power was the largest one.

Tim did not know. That was the thing curdling slowly beneath every warm moment.

Sometimes you almost told him. After dinner in your apartment, when he was leaning back in his chair with his socked feet hooked around the chair legs, smiling sleepily at your terrible impression of the landlord. In the laundry room, when he confessed he hated silence but needed it, which you understood so deeply it hurt. On the fire escape, when the city was cold and he sat beside you with his shoulder touching yours, close enough that your power hummed under your skin and your want felt like a second pulse.

“I think better around you,” he said once. You looked at him sharply. He was staring out over the alley, profile painted blue by the neon sign below. “Not like— I don’t know. My head is usually… loud. Around you, it’s quieter.”

Guilt moved through you so quickly you nearly shivered.

“Is that bad?” you asked, because you were a coward and wanted him to say no.

Tim glanced at you. His smile was small. “No. It’s kind of my favourite thing.”

You should have told him then. Instead, you leaned your shoulder against his and said, “Maybe I’m just boring.”

He laughed.

You let the secret stay hidden under the sound.

The reveal happened on a Tuesday. There should have been a storm. A dramatic one, ideally. Gotham loved storm symbolism. Rain on windows, thunder over rooftops, the city throwing weather at everyone’s unresolved issues like confetti. But the night was clear and cold, moonlight turning the alley below your apartment into a strip of dirty silver. You had gone to bed early for once, which meant you were lying awake at one in the morning because your body did not trust peace when offered.

Tim had come home an hour before. You had heard him through the wall: the lock, the slow steps, the bathroom tap, the soft thud of something heavier than a laptop hitting the floor. He had not knocked on your door. You had not knocked on his. The space between you felt strange lately, charged with almost-confessions and unsaid things.

Then you heard glass break.

Not in your apartment. In his.

You were out of bed before thought caught up. For half a second, you stood barefoot in your dark bedroom, listening. Another sound came through the wall: a crash, a muffled grunt, something heavy slamming into furniture. Your power flared, reaching for the panic next door.

Tim’s panic. Sharp. Blinding. Not the usual restless anxiety. This was survival fear. Injury. Disorientation. The frantic, spiralling terror of someone whose body had been pushed past its limits and whose mind had decided, very inconveniently, to keep calculating anyway.

You grabbed the baseball bat you kept behind your door because Gotham tenancy practically came with a weapons clause, then ran into the hall.

Tim’s door was locked.

You banged your fist against it. “Tim!”

No answer.

Another crash. A man cursed inside.

Your heart slammed against your ribs. You did not think about the ethics of breaking in. You did not think about secrets. You did not think about the shared wall or all the nights you had poured quiet through it like contraband.

You used the spare key Tim had given you “for plant emergencies.” The plant, you felt, would understand.

You opened the door into chaos.

Tim’s apartment looked nothing like you expected. Not because it was messy. You had expected messy. You had not expected tactical.

The living room was sparse, almost unlived-in, furniture chosen for function rather than comfort. A worktable dominated one side, covered in equipment, cables, case files, and a half-disassembled gauntlet. A reinforced cabinet stood open near the wall, empty hooks inside. One window had shattered inward, glass glittering across the floor. A figure in black lay unconscious near the overturned coffee table.

And Tim—

Tim was on his knees beside the bedroom doorway, one hand pressed hard against his side, blood slipping between his fingers. He was wearing red and black armour. A cape pooled behind him. A domino mask had been shoved halfway up his face, revealing one wild blue eye and half of a bruise-dark cheek. His hair was damp with sweat. His breath came too fast.

Red Robin. Tim was Red Robin.

For one surreal second, your brain refused the information.

Then Tim looked at you. The panic in him spiked so violently you nearly staggered.

“Get out,” he gasped.

You stepped inside.

His eyes widened. “No. No, you need to leave. There could be more—”

The unconscious intruder groaned.

You lifted the bat on instinct.

Tim, bleeding and barely upright, still managed to look offended. “Is that a baseball bat?”

“Focus, Red Robin.”

His face went through six emotions in half a second and landed on horror. “You know.”

“You are wearing the suit.”

“That is not— that’s not the priority right now.”

“Agreed.”

You shut the door behind you and locked it.

Tim tried to stand. Failed. His hand slipped against the wall, leaving a streak of blood.

“Tim.”

“I’m fine.”

“You are bleeding on your floor.”

“It’s shallow.”

“It is actively escaping your body.”

“Please leave.”

“No.”

His panic flared again, and this time it hit you fully. Not just fear of the intruder. Fear of you seeing. Fear of the secret cracking open. Fear of being weak in front of someone whose opinion had started to matter too much. Beneath it, something darker: the sharp chemical edge of whatever toxin or sedative the intruder’s blade had carried. His thoughts were accelerating, not slowing. You could feel it. His body was trying to go into shock, and his brain was fighting the process like it could outlogic blood loss.

You dropped the bat and crossed the room.

Tim flinched back.

Not from you. From everything.

“Don’t,” he said, voice shaking. “I can’t— I can’t think.”

“I know.”

“No, you don’t. It’s too loud. Everything is too— I need to—” His breath hitched. “I need to check the window. There might be another entry point. Comms are down. My phone— where’s my phone? I have to call—”

“Tim.”

His eyes darted over your shoulder. The unconscious intruder shifted again.

You grabbed a cable from the worktable, crouched by the intruder long enough to bind his wrists with a knot that would probably make any vigilante judge you but did the job, then returned to Tim.

He stared at you. “That knot is terrible.”

“You can critique my hostage management after you stop bleeding.”

“He’s not a hostage.”

“Tim.”

His breath hitched again, too fast, too shallow. You could see the moment his body started to lose the fight. His face went grey. His hand slipped from his side. Blood darkened the red of his suit, which was deeply unfair design-wise because it made damage harder to see.

“Hey,” you said, dropping to your knees in front of him. “Look at me.”

He did, but barely. His gaze kept sliding away.

You knew you should ask. Even now. Especially now. But he was bleeding, panicking, toxin-bright, and looking at you like he was falling through his own body. There are lines people draw in calm rooms that become jagged in emergencies. You had always told yourself that immediate danger changed the ethics. You believed that. You still believed that.

It did not make what came next painless.

“Tim,” you said, voice softening into the tone you almost never used around him when he was awake. “I can help you calm down. I need to touch your hand. Is that okay?”

His eyes struggled to focus on you. “What?”

“You’re panicking. I can help.”

“How?”

No time. Not enough time for the whole truth. Not enough time to explain the wall, the warmth, the power born from loneliness and given away like breath.

“I’ll tell you after,” you said. “But I need you to say yes.”

Tim’s mouth trembled. He hated needing. You knew that now more than ever. He hated it like a locked room, like a failed equation, like a weakness he could research away if he just stayed awake long enough.

The intruder groaned louder.

Tim’s breathing tipped toward hyperventilation.

“Okay,” he said, barely audible. “Yes.”

You took his hand.

Your power surged. Not through the wall this time. Not soft and deniable. Not the secret atmosphere of sleep. This was direct, skin to skin, emergency-bright. Warmth moved from your palm into his shaking fingers, up his arm, across the frantic field of his nervous system. You did not touch his thoughts. You did not alter his choices. You only gave his body something it had been denied for too long: the message that it was allowed to survive without solving everything first.

Tim gasped. His hand clenched around yours. The panic did not vanish, but it slowed. His breathing caught, broke, steadied. The wild darting of his eyes eased. His body sagged against the wall, and horror dawned across his face even as calm settled unwillingly into his bones.

He felt it. Worse, he recognised it.

You saw the exact second he did. The nights through the wall. The impossible sleep. The quieter mind. The reason your presence had felt like safety with invisible architecture.

His eyes sharpened on yours.

“No,” he whispered.

Your throat closed. “Tim—”

“You’ve done this before.”

The words were too calm because your power still held him inside that forced quiet. That was the cruellest part.

His anger arrived, but it could not catch fire. It hit the warmth you had poured into him and softened at the edges before he could choose what shape it took. He was upset. You could feel it. Betrayed, horrified, scared. But his body would not let the panic rise properly, not while your power was still helping him breathe.

He tried to pull his hand away. You let go immediately.

The calm snapped back.

Tim doubled over, breath stuttering, and fresh blood slipped between his fingers. The toxin-panic surged again, dragging him toward shock and spiralling calculation.

You caught his hand again on instinct. Warmth flooded back.

Tim went still. His eyes filled with furious, helpless tears.

“Stop,” he said.

You started to pull away. His breath broke.

“Don’t,” he gasped, and the word sounded ripped out of him. “Don’t stop. I can’t— I can’t—”

“I’m here,” you whispered, crying now because there was no clean way to do this. “I’m here, Tim. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

His hand trembled violently in yours. “You’re making me calm.”

“I’m keeping you from going into shock.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“I know.”

“You were—” His voice cracked. “Through the wall. It was you.”

Your tears slipped down your face. “Yes.”

Tim closed his eyes. His face crumpled, but the calm stayed. The power held his body steady while his trust broke apart in your hands.

That would haunt you for a long time.

You worked because there was nothing else to do. With one hand linked to Tim’s, you used the other to help him guide you through the emergency supplies in his apartment. He was frighteningly lucid once your power stabilised him, which made the whole thing worse. He instructed you through cutting away part of the suit, applying pressure, checking for embedded material, neutralising the toxin with an injector from the cabinet. His voice stayed level because of you. His eyes stayed wounded because of you too.

“Left drawer,” he said. You reached. “No, other left.”

“You are poisoned and bleeding. Do not judge my directions.”

“That was your left.”

“You are wearing a cape indoors.”

“That’s not relevant.”

“It feels relevant.”

For one impossible second, his mouth twitched. Then the moment collapsed under the weight of everything unsaid.

You called emergency contacts from his encrypted phone under his direction. Someone named Alfred answered first, voice calm until you said Tim’s name and “stab wound” in the same sentence. Then a woman named Barbara came onto the line, all clipped focus and lethal competence, guiding you through what to monitor until help arrived.

Tim’s thumb twitched against yours once.

Not a squeeze. Not comfort. A reflex, maybe.

You held his hand because he had not told you to let go again. You did not know whether that made it better or worse.

By the time Nightwing arrived through the shattered window, because apparently doors were ornamental in the vigilante community, Tim was pale but stable on the floor, your hand still wrapped around his and your power still running low and constant between you.

Nightwing took in the scene in one sweep: unconscious intruder, blood, you, Tim, the joined hands.

His expression changed.

“Oh,” he said softly.

Tim’s eyes opened. “Don’t.”

Nightwing swallowed whatever he had been about to say.

“Okay,” he said. “Medical first.”

Red Hood appeared ten minutes later and made a comment about Tim getting stabbed in his own apartment being “rookie behaviour,” but his voice went tight when he saw the amount of blood. Batman arrived last, silent and grim, and you felt Tim’s whole body tense through the hand you still held.

Not fear. Not exactly. Something more complicated.

The family worked around you with practised efficiency. They moved like a storm system with history. Nightwing gentle at Tim’s shoulder. Red Hood binding the intruder with a knot that made yours look like pasta. Batman scanning the blade and the toxin. A girl in black—Orphan, maybe, though no one introduced anyone because apparently masks were optional but names were too intimate—standing near you with quiet eyes that saw entirely too much.

When Alfred arrived, he did not ask who you were. He only looked at Tim, then at your hand in his, then at your face.

“Thank you,” he said.

You nearly broke.

Tim heard it. His eyes turned toward you, tired and terrible.

“No,” he said quietly.

Alfred’s expression shifted.

You let go because Tim’s wound had been treated, because the toxin had stabilised, because he had asked with one word and this time you could obey without letting him crash.

Your power withdrew.

Tim inhaled sharply but did not spiral.

Good. That was good. It still felt like losing the last thread holding the room together.

Batman offered to take Tim to the Cave. Tim refused with the kind of flatness that made even Batman pause. Alfred negotiated him down to “medical care here, but only if you do not attempt to stand, Master Timothy.” Tim looked like he wanted to argue and then, for once in his life, did not have the blood pressure for it.

You stayed until you were no longer needed.

Then you stood.

Tim looked up from the couch where Nightwing had bullied him into lying down.

His voice was hoarse. “Don’t leave.”

You froze. The whole room froze with you.

Tim closed his eyes like he hated that he had said it out loud. Then he opened them again, and whatever had been forced calm before was gone now. This was only him. Hurt. Angry. Afraid. Honest because exhaustion had burned through the places where he kept his masks.

“Not yet,” he said.

You sat back down in the chair across from him.

Not beside him. Not close enough to touch.

But you stayed.

The confrontation came after everyone left. Or mostly left. You were fairly sure that at least two vigilantes were on nearby rooftops, pretending that they did not count. Alfred had gone downstairs to bring the car around after extracting a promise from Tim that he would not move. Batman had vanished into the hall with the intruder and a guilt-shaped silence. Nightwing had squeezed Tim’s shoulder and given you a look that was half sympathy, half warning. Red Hood had muttered, “Don’t be stupid, Replacement,” which Tim had accepted with the weary air of someone receiving a family blessing.

Then it was just you and Tim in the ruined apartment. Broken glass glittered near the window. Blood stained the floorboards. His bedroom door was ajar, and beyond it, through some awful domestic irony, you could see the other side of the wall you had spent months touching from your own room.

Tim noticed where you were looking.

His face went still.

“How long?” he asked.

There it was.

You folded your hands together in your lap so you would not reach for anything. “Since the first month.”

He breathed out. It was not quite a laugh. “The first month.”

“I didn’t know you then.”

“That does not make it better.”

“No,” you whispered. “It doesn’t.”

His eyes were bright, feverish with pain and betrayal and blood loss. “You were affecting me through the wall.”

“Yes.”

“While I was sleeping.”

“Helping you sleep.”

His jaw clenched. “That distinction is doing a lot of work.”

You looked down. “I know.”

“Did you know it was me?”

“Not at first.”

“And after?” You closed your eyes. Tim’s voice went quieter. “After we became friends?”

“Yes.”

He looked away. The word hurt him more because it was honest.

“Okay,” he said.

No yelling. No dramatic accusation. Just that. Okay. Like he was filing the pain somewhere precise because he did not have enough energy to let it spill.

You would have preferred yelling.

“You should yell,” you said, then hated yourself for the selfishness of it.

Tim’s eyes snapped back to you. “Don’t tell me how to react.”

“You’re right. I’m sorry.”

He laughed once under his breath. “You’re sorry.”

“I am.”

“You were in my apartment tonight because you heard someone break in.”

“Yes.”

“And you found out I’m Red Robin.”

“Yes.”

“And I found out the reason I’ve been sleeping better for months is because my neighbour has been dosing me with emotional regulation through drywall.”

You flinched. Tim saw it. Unlike you, he did not soften the truth to make the hurt easier.

“You consented tonight,” you said quietly. “Not to before. But tonight, I asked.”

“Yes,” Tim said. “Tonight, you asked because you had to. Because I was looking at you.”

The sentence went through you like a blade. You had no defence.

Tim’s hands curled weakly in the blanket Alfred had thrown over him. “I thought it was me.”

Your throat tightened.

“I thought I was sleeping because I trusted you,” he said. “Because I felt safe next to that wall. Because for once, my brain didn’t have to monitor every exit and every worst-case scenario and every person who could disappear if I missed something. I thought being near you made me feel safe because…” He stopped.

Your heart hurt so badly you pressed a hand to your sternum.

Tim’s mouth twisted. “Because I liked you.”

The confession landed wrong.

You swallowed around tears. “Tim.”

“No.” He looked at you, and there was anger now, under the exhaustion, clean and deserved. “No, you don’t get to say my name like that. Not right now.”

You nodded quickly. “Okay.”

“I thought I was choosing to let my guard down.”

“You were.”

“Was I?”

The question broke. Not loudly. Tim was too tired for loud. But it broke all the same.

You looked at him through tears. “I don’t know.”

His face crumpled for half a second before he controlled it. That was worse than crying.

“I don’t know,” you repeated. “And that’s my fault. I can tell you I didn’t make you like me. I can tell you I didn’t change your thoughts or your feelings. I can tell you I only helped your body calm down enough to sleep. But I hid it from you, so I don’t get to be believed just because I’m telling the truth now.”

Tim stared at you. His eyes went wet.

“You really don’t,” he said.

You nodded. The room blurred.

“I’m sorry,” you said. “Not because you found out. Because I did it. Because I convinced myself that helping you rest was harmless since you needed it. Because you were so tired, and I could feel it through the wall, and I kept thinking one night of sleep couldn’t be wrong. Then it became two. Then it became something I did because I cared about you, which made it feel kinder and not worse.”

Tim looked down at his hands.

“I’m sorry,” you said again. “Because you gave me a key for plant emergencies, and I used months of proximity like permission. Because you trusted me with the ordinary parts of you, and I answered with a secret.”

Tim’s breath shook.

For a while, he said nothing.

Then he asked, “What are you?”

Not cruelly. Not fearfully, either. Just hurt enough to need the shape of the truth.

You told him. You told him about the bird, about being alone, about the first warmth leaving you because nothing had ever come toward you. You told him how the power worked and how it did not. You told him it could comfort others, but never yourself. You told him you tried to ask, always, because you knew comfort without choice could become a cage made of soft things.

Tim listened without interrupting. That was his gift and his cruelty in that moment. He listened like a detective. Like a friend. Like someone building a timeline of the damage.

When you finished, the apartment was quiet.

Then Tim said, “You knew it was wrong.”

You closed your eyes. “Yes.”

“And you kept doing it.”

“Yes.”

The simplicity of it made him look away.

You wanted to tell him you loved him.

You did not. That would have been another weight handed to him while he was bleeding.

Instead, you said, “I’ll move my bed.”

Tim looked back at you, confused.

“The shared wall,” you said. “I’ll move my bed to the other side of the room. Or sleep in the living room until I find another apartment. I won’t let it happen again.”

Something passed over his face, quick and unreadable.

“You don’t have to move out,” he said.

“You don’t have to comfort me.”

“I’m not.” His voice sharpened, then faded. “I don’t know what I’m doing.”

“That’s okay.”

“It is not okay.”

“No,” you said softly. “It isn’t.”

He stared at you for a long time. Then his gaze shifted to the broken window, the blood, the suit pieces scattered across his floor. “You know now.”

“You’re Red Robin.”

“Yes.”

“I won’t tell anyone.”

“I know.”

The answer came too quickly.

You looked at him. He looked away first.

There it was: the awful, tangled truth that betrayal did not erase trust cleanly. He still believed some parts of you. Still knew you would keep his secret. Still wanted you to stay. Still wished you had never given him reason to question the safety he had built around your presence.

“I’m angry,” he said.

“I know.”

“I still want you here.”

Your breath caught.

His eyes closed. “I hate that.”

“I know.”

“I don’t know if I can sleep if you leave.”

The words were so small, so humiliatingly honest, that tears spilled down your cheeks before you could stop them.

Tim opened his eyes and looked devastated by his own need.

You kept your hands in your lap. “I can stay in the chair.”

“No powers.”

“No powers.”

“If I panic—”

“I’ll talk. I won’t touch it unless you ask.”

He swallowed.

“And if you ask,” you said, “I’ll tell you exactly what I’m doing before I do it.”

Tim nodded once. Then, because he was Tim, because even bleeding and betrayed, he still needed precision; he said, “Define exactly.”

A broken laugh escaped you. He did not smile, but something in his face softened by a millimetre.

“I’ll define exactly,” you promised.

You stayed in the chair until dawn.

Tim did not sleep for most of it. Neither did you. He drifted once or twice, jolting awake each time with a sharp inhale, eyes going to you immediately as if checking whether calm had been placed over him without permission. Each time, you lifted your hands where he could see them.

“No powers,” you said quietly.

Each time, he nodded and looked away, hurt all over again by the fact that he had to check.

When Alfred returned at sunrise, he found you still in the chair and Tim awake on the couch, both of you pale, exhausted, and silent. His eyes moved between you with enough understanding that you wondered how many versions of this room he had seen before. Secrets. Hurt. Love that arrived carrying knives it did not mean to use.

“Master Timothy,” Alfred said gently, “the car is ready.”

Tim looked at you. You did not move.

After a moment, he said, “You should come.”

Alfred’s brows rose slightly. So did yours.

Tim’s face flushed with irritation at both of you. “Not to the Cave. Downstairs. There’s glass everywhere, and your apartment shares the wall with mine. If the break-in was targeted, you’re not safe.”

“You are in no condition to make security decisions.”

“I’m always in condition to make security decisions.”

“You were stabbed.”

“Which means I have recent field data.”

You stared at him.

Alfred sighed with the deep weariness of a man who had raised far too many vigilantes. “I’m afraid that is, by local standards, one of his more reasonable arguments.”

Despite everything, you laughed.

Tim looked at you. For a second, the hurt in his eyes did not vanish, but it made room for something else. Something remembered. Something not entirely destroyed.

The days after were strange.

You moved your bed. It felt ceremonial in the worst way, dragging the frame across the floor while the wall stood bare and ordinary behind you, as if it had not been the site of your quietest crime. Tim stayed at the Manor for two nights under Alfred’s orders, then returned to 4B despite everyone apparently telling him not to. You knew because you heard three separate voices arguing in the hallway before Tim said, “I’m not twelve,” and someone who sounded like Red Hood replied, “Could’ve fooled me, spleen boy.”

When Tim knocked on your door later, he looked like he should still be in bed and had chosen stubbornness instead because apparently that was his primary operating system.

You opened the door. He looked past you, into the apartment. His gaze landed on the new position of your bed through the bedroom doorway.

His mouth tightened. “You moved it.”

“I said I would.”

“I didn’t ask you to.”

“You shouldn’t have to.”

He had no immediate answer to that.

You stepped aside. “Do you want to come in?”

Tim hesitated. Then nodded.

He sat at your kitchen table, the same one where he had eaten soup and pretended not to need care. He moved carefully, one hand still protective near his side. You made tea. Not coffee. He noticed and did not complain, which told you he was either maturing or concussed. Possibly both.

For several minutes, neither of you spoke.

Finally, Tim said, “I made a spreadsheet.”

You closed your eyes. “Of course you did.”

“It’s not about your feelings.”

You opened one eye.

“It’s about boundaries,” he clarified.

“That is not as reassuring as you think.”

“It has tabs.”

“Tim.”

“One tab.”

“Tim.”

He looked down at the mug between his hands. “I needed to make it something I could look at.”

Your heart softened and hurt at the same time.

“Okay,” you said.

He pulled a folded sheet of paper from his pocket. Not a spreadsheet, then. A list. Handwritten. That somehow felt worse. More personal. Less like Red Robin processing an incident and more like Tim trying to build a bridge with shaking hands.

You read it slowly.

No powers through shared walls. No powers while he slept unless explicitly requested before sleep. No powers for panic unless he asked or was in immediate life-threatening danger. If used in an emergency, disclosure afterwards in detail. Verbal check-ins before touch when possible. You allowed to say no.

That last line made you look up. Tim was staring at his tea.

“You wrote that,” you said.

“I noticed you didn’t include yourself in the rules when you apologised.”

Your throat tightened.

“I’m angry,” he said, still looking down. “I don’t trust the power right now. I don’t know how long that’ll take. But I also don’t want to turn this into you owing me unlimited help with better paperwork.”

“Tim.”

His jaw tightened at your voice, but not in warning this time.

You looked back at the paper. “This is good.”

“It’s incomplete.”

“Most human things are.”

He made a quiet sound that might have been agreement.

You folded the paper carefully and placed it on the table between you. “I can follow this.”

“I know.”

The trust in those two words hurt more than suspicion.

Tim finally looked at you. His eyes were tired, shadowed, still wounded. But he was there. Not behind the wall. Not behind the mask. Not pretending the hurt had vanished because it was inconvenient.

“I miss you,” he said.

You stopped breathing.

He looked annoyed with himself. “I’m also mad at you. I contain multitudes.”

A laugh broke out of you, soft and wet.

His mouth twitched.

“I miss you too,” you said.

“I know.”

“Cocky.”

“No. Observant.”

“You’re insufferable.”

“You made me soup about it.”

“That was before I knew you had a vigilante complex.”

“Technically, you suspected.”

“Technically, I was being polite.”

Tim’s smile appeared for half a second, fragile as a match flame. Then it faded.

“I don’t know what we are now,” he said.

“Me neither.”

“I still like you.”

Your chest hurt. He said it like a confession and a complaint.

“I still like you too,” you whispered.

“That complicates the betrayal.”

“It really does.”

He looked at you then, and there was something almost like grief in his smile. “Very inconvenient.”

“Deeply.”

Neither of you moved closer.

That was important. Some love stories began with a kiss. Yours, if it was allowed to become a love story at all, would have to begin with not reaching. With space respected. With the wall made ordinary again, brick by brick.

Weeks passed. Trust did not return like a dramatic sunrise. It came back like a stray animal: suspicious, hungry, circling the room before deciding whether the hand offered was safe. Tim still startled awake sometimes when you were nearby. You still caught yourself wanting to smooth the exhaustion from him with a thought and had to breathe through the ache of not doing it. He did not sleep through the wall anymore. You did not try to help.

Instead, you learned the old-fashioned way.

You texted, Are you awake because of work or because your brain is being rude?

He replied, Yes.

You wrote, That was not multiple choice.

He sent, It was to me.

You asked, Do you want company?

Sometimes he said no. You respected it.

Sometimes he said yes. You came over and sat on the floor while he worked at the table, no power, no touching, only presence. Sometimes you read aloud from whatever book you had brought until his typing slowed naturally. Sometimes you talked about nothing: Mrs Alvarez’s crusade against the recycling bins, the feral cat’s increasingly bold attempts to move into your apartment, the fact that Tim’s sad windowsill plant might actually be a plastic plant and neither of you had noticed for months.

“Statistically,” Tim said one night, squinting at the plant, “it should have changed by now.”

“You watered plastic.”

“So did you.”

“We are both victims.”

“Of what?”

“Plant fraud.”

He laughed, and the sound was tired but real.

No power. Just him.

That became the measure of things.

No power. Just dinner. Just tea. Just Tim falling asleep on your couch once with his head tilted back and his mouth slightly open while you sat frozen across the room, terrified that even looking at him too fondly might count as interference. When he woke, he looked at you, then at the blanket you had placed over him without touching his skin.

“You didn’t,” he said.

“No.”

He nodded. Then, after a pause, “Thank you.”

You did not ask whether he meant the blanket or the restraint. Maybe both.

The first time he asked, it was raining. Of course it was. Gotham did have narrative instincts sometimes.

Tim showed up at your door just after midnight wearing sweatpants, a hoodie, and the expression of someone who had spent too long arguing with himself and lost. You opened the door and found him standing with wet hair and no shoes.

“No shoes?” you asked.

“I live next door.”

“That has not stopped you from being dramatic before.”

His mouth twitched, but the exhaustion in him was heavy. Not the old frantic pressure through the wall. Something quieter, chosen and brought to you by hand. “Can I come in?”

“Yes.”

He stepped inside. You closed the door.

For a moment, he stood in your living room looking everywhere but at you. Your bed was still against the far wall now. The shared wall stood bare in the bedroom, a blank piece of plaster holding its history quietly.

“I can’t sleep,” Tim said.

You nodded. “Do you want tea?”

“No.”

“Do you want me to sit with you?”

“Yes.” He swallowed. “And… maybe more.”

Your heart began to pound.

Tim looked at you then, nervous and pale and brave in a way most people would never recognise because it did not wear armour. “I’m asking,” he said. “Out loud. I hate it.”

You smiled softly, though your eyes burned. “I’m listening.”

His fingers curled into his sleeves. “Can you help me calm down enough to sleep? Not through the wall. Not while I’m unaware. I want to know what’s happening.”

“Okay,” you said carefully. “I can sit beside you. I can hold your hand if you want. I’ll let a small amount of warmth move through touch. It should help your body feel safe enough to rest. It won’t make you sleep. It won’t change your thoughts. If you say stop, I stop immediately.”

Tim nodded once.

“Do you want that?” you asked.

His breath shook. “Yes.”

You sat together on the couch.

Not the bed. Not the wall.

A new place.

Tim held out his hand first. You took it.

Your power moved gently this time, with permission, with witness, with every door open and named. Warmth passed between your palms, no longer a secret seeped through plaster, but a chosen thing held in both hands. Tim’s eyes fluttered shut. His shoulders lowered slowly. His breathing eased by degrees. You watched him carefully, ready to stop at the smallest sign.

After a minute, he whispered, “That’s enough.”

You stopped immediately.

His eyes opened. The room felt fragile around you.

“Okay?” you asked.

Tim looked at your joined hands. “Yeah.”

“You sure?”

“No.” His mouth curved faintly. “But yeah.”

You laughed under your breath.

He leaned back into the couch, still holding your hand. After a moment, his head tipped sideways until it rested lightly against your shoulder.

You went completely still.

“No powers?” he murmured.

“No powers.”

“Good.”

His eyes closed.

This time, when Tim fell asleep, it was not because you quieted him through a wall. It was not because you decided his body needed rest and made the night softer without telling him. It was because he had knocked on your door, asked to come in, asked for help, asked you to stop, and found that every answer mattered.

He slept against your shoulder.

You stayed awake for a while, not out of guilt, not because your power required it, but because the moment was too tender to rush past. Tim’s hand remained loose in yours. Rain tapped against the window. The apartment next door was silent. The wall between your bedrooms stood untouched in the dark.

For once, there was no secret warmth moving through it. Only two people on one side of a door, choosing the same room.

When morning came, Tim woke slowly, lashes fluttering, confusion softening into memory. He did not jerk away. He did not panic. He only lifted his head from your shoulder and blinked at you with sleep-warm eyes.

“I slept,” he said.

“You did.”

“On you.”

“Technically, against me.”

“That legal distinction matters.”

“I thought you liked precision.”

His smile came slowly. “I do.”

You looked at him, and the ache in your chest was almost too much to hold. “Was it okay?”

Tim considered the question seriously because he was Tim and because the question deserved seriousness.

Then he nodded.

“It was mine,” he said.

Your throat tightened. His fingers shifted in yours, not quite a squeeze, but close.

“And yours,” he added, quieter. “Because you asked too.”

You did not cry. Almost.

Tim noticed anyway.

His thumb brushed over your knuckles. No powers. No hidden comfort. Just touch, small and chosen.

“Can I kiss you?” he asked.

Your breath caught.

Trust was not healed. Not entirely. Hurt did not vanish because love stood near it with hopeful hands. But Tim was asking. You were listening. The space between you had become something neither wall nor wound.

“Yes,” you whispered.

Tim leaned in slowly.

The kiss was soft, almost shy, and full of all the things that had taken months to become safe enough to want. There was no magic in it. No warmth except the ordinary kind. His hand cupped your jaw with careful fingers, and yours rested lightly against his shoulder, where you could feel him breathing. He kissed like someone testing a bridge he had chosen to rebuild plank by plank. You kissed him back like someone who had finally learned that comfort did not have to be stolen from secrecy to be real.

When he pulled away, his forehead rested against yours.

“No powers?” he asked again, voice barely there.

You smiled. “No powers.”

His eyes closed.

“Good,” he whispered. “I want to know when it’s you.”

Your heart hurt, but this time the hurt had light inside it.

“It’s me,” you said.

Outside, Gotham woke in sirens, rainwater, and the low grind of another day. In the apartment beside yours, the wall stood quiet. It would never be innocent again, not completely. But maybe that was true of most things worth saving. They carried the shape of what had happened to them. They did not become untouched. They became honest.

Tim’s hand found yours again. You held on.

Not to calm him. Not to keep him.

Then you had stepped out of the shadows with blood on your sleeve and a voice like warm rain.

“Can I help them?” you had asked.

Batman had turned on you like a weapon. He had not known you then. He had only known you were there, unaccounted for, unafraid, standing in the wreckage of a Talon cell with trembling hands and eyes too old for your face. You should have looked like a survivor. You should have looked like another person who needed carrying out.

Instead, you had looked at the people in the cages and cried for them without making your grief the loudest thing in the room.

“What can you do?” Batman had asked.

“Comfort,” you said.

It had sounded too small for what happened next.

You had knelt outside the first cage and asked the man inside if he wanted you to come closer. He had spat at you. You had nodded like that was answer enough and stayed where you were, hand open on the stone floor, palm up, no demand in it. The air around you had changed by degrees. Batman remembered that most of all: not light, exactly, not a visible glow, not magic in the theatrical way Gotham sometimes spat up from its cursed old foundations. Just warmth. Shelter. The impossible sensation of standing in a room where fear had been the only language spoken for weeks and hearing, suddenly, a second language answer it.

The man had stopped shaking. Then a woman in the next cage began to sob. Then a child crawled toward the bars and reached for your hand.

Batman had watched you give something away. He had watched the tremor start in your fingers and climb up your arms. He had watched the colour drain slowly from your mouth. He had watched every person in that room breathe easier while you became colder and quieter, while the hurt lifted from them and settled somewhere inside you where no one else could see.

Afterwards, you had refused medical transport with a politeness so brittle it nearly cut.

Batman had followed you into the alley behind the church. Rain had been falling in thin, mean sheets. Your breath had fogged in the cold. You had leaned one shoulder against the brick and pressed both hands to your sternum like you were trying to put yourself back inside your own body.

“You’re a metahuman,” he said.

You laughed once, exhausted and humourless. “Usually people say thank you first.”

“Thank you.”

That had surprised you enough to make you look at him.

Batman stood in the rain with his cape dripping black onto the pavement, unreadable and enormous and too still. You could feel the grief in him even then, though you had not known its shape. It was old. Armored. The kind of pain that had built a city inside itself and populated it with rules.

“You helped them,” he said.

“They let me.”

“You asked.”

“I always ask.”

His silence had shifted. You had not known him well enough then to translate it, but later you would understand. Batman trusted rules more than people, and you had just offered him one.

“I don’t control anyone,” you said. “I don’t erase pain. I don’t force forgiveness, or happiness, or obedience. I can make the fear loosen. I can make someone feel safe enough to choose what they do next. That’s all.”

“That’s not all.”

“No,” you admitted. “But it’s the part that matters.”

He had studied you through the rain. “What does it cost?”

You had smiled at him then, which was unfair, because the smile made you look gentler than the answer deserved. “More than people like to hear.”

Batman had not pressed.

That was why, years later, when Bruce Wayne called and asked for your help, you picked up.

Not because you trusted Batman completely. You had worked with him enough times to know trust with Bruce Wayne was less a door and more a series of reinforced checkpoints. But he had never tried to put you in a lab. He had never asked you to use your power on someone who refused. He had never called you an asset to your face, which, for a man with contingency plans for his contingency plans, probably counted as emotional growth.

So when he said there was a case involving Lazarus contamination, you came to Gotham.

You should have known better.

The cave had not changed. It was still cold stone and colder light, a cathedral built for secrecy, humming with machines that looked expensive enough to develop opinions. Bruce stood near the main computer in a black sweater instead of the suit, which should have made him seem less like Batman and somehow did not. His face was tired in a way money could not soften. Alfred gave you tea with the solemn expression of a man who knew the whole truth and had been quietly disappointed in everyone for years.

“There have been three incidents,” Bruce said, pulling up footage on the screen. “Low-level criminals exposed to a modified compound derived from Lazarus Pit residue. Heightened aggression, regenerative instability, temporary dissociation, violent emotional amplification.”

You watched a man in a convenience store rip a steel shelf from the wall with his bare hands while screaming for someone who was not there. The footage changed. A woman in restraints wept green-tinged tears and begged the doctors not to let her sleep because something was waiting under the dark. Another clip showed a warehouse fight, shaky security footage catching a flash of red helmet and gunmetal before the camera cut out.

Your eyes moved back to Bruce.

“There’s more,” you said.

Bruce did not answer quickly enough. Alfred’s expression, somehow, became even more disappointed.

You set your tea down untouched. “Bruce.”

His jaw tightened. “Jason has been affected by Lazarus exposure before.”

The name landed carefully, like something fragile placed on a table.

Jason. You knew of him, of course. Everyone in Gotham who knew Batman’s world knew of Jason Todd in pieces: the dead Robin, the resurrected son, the Red Hood, the boy who came back wrong because Gotham had never met a tragedy it could not make worse with time, magic, or parental failure. You had never met him properly. You had seen him once from a rooftop across a street, red helmet shining under rain, moving through Crime Alley like a warning with a heartbeat.

Bruce continued, “The recent incidents have aggravated his episodes.”

Your stomach sank. “Episodes.”

Bruce’s eyes flicked away. Only for a second. “Lazarus episodes. Rage spikes. Dissociation. Sensory distortion. He becomes more reactive after exposure to certain compounds, especially when the residue has been altered.”

“And you want me on the case because I can stabilise victims.”

“Yes.”

The answer was too clean.

You waited. Bruce closed his eyes for the length of one breath. When he opened them, Batman looked out through Bruce Wayne’s face. Not the cowl. Worse. The will. The fear pretending to be strategy.

“I also want you near Jason,” he said.

There it was. The real mission. The ugly little bone under the offered hand.

“Near him,” you repeated.

“Your presence alone has had measurable effects in past cases. Victims calm faster when you’re in proximity, even without direct contact.”

“I know how my power works.”

“I believe you could reduce the severity of his episodes.”

“Does Jason know you’re asking me this?”

Bruce said nothing.

You laughed softly, but there was no humour in it. “No, then.”

“He won’t accept help if he knows.”

“Then that’s his choice.”

“He’s suffering.”

“So are most people in Gotham. I don’t sneak into their nervous systems because someone with a cape thinks they’d be more convenient if they stopped hurting so loudly.”

Bruce flinched. Good. Some anger in you wanted him to. Another part of you hated that you knew exactly why he was doing this.

Because Bruce loved like a man trying to defuse a bomb with his bare hands. Because Jason was both his son and his failure, and Bruce could not look at one without feeling the other cut through him. Because he would rather turn the whole city upside down than ask Jason for permission to care and risk being told no.

“I’m not asking you to alter him,” Bruce said.

“You are.”

“I’m asking you to help him.”

“You’re asking me to make him easier to survive.”

The words went cold between you.

Alfred looked down. Bruce’s face tightened, and for a moment, he looked less like Batman and more like a father too exhausted by fear to dress it properly. “I can’t keep watching him destroy himself.”

“And you think I can fix him.”

“No.”

The denial came fast. Too fast. You stared at him until he looked away.

“I don’t agree with that word,” you said. “People aren’t broken appliances. His rage might be hurting him, but it also belongs to him. His pain belongs to him. You don’t get to decide he’d be better without it.”

Bruce’s voice dropped. “If he kills someone during an episode—”

“Then that still doesn’t make his consent optional.”

Silence spread through the cave, wide and echoing.

You should have walked out. You almost did.

But then the footage on the screen flickered back to Red Hood in the warehouse, his body jerking mid-fight as if something inside him had pulled hard on a chain. You watched him slam one hand against a wall, watched him shake his head like he was trying to dislodge a voice, watched him turn away from an unconscious man with visible effort. You saw the restraint. Not ease. Not goodness handed down like a verdict from someone safer. Choice. Brutal, shaking, deliberate choice.

And you hated Bruce a little for knowing you would see it.

“I won’t use my power on him without permission,” you said.

Bruce looked at you.

“I mean it. Not targeted. Not deliberately. Not because you ask, not because you worry, not because you think his emotions are inconvenient.”

“I understand.”

“No,” you said. “You don’t. But you’re going to pretend you do because that’s what men like you do when you want something badly enough to call it necessary.”

Alfred made a small sound that might, under different circumstances, have been approval. Bruce absorbed it without defending himself.

You hated that too.

“I’ll help with the case,” you said. “I’ll help contaminated victims. If Jason wants to know what I can do, I’ll tell him. If he asks for help, I’ll help. That’s all.”

Bruce nodded once.

You wanted to believe that was an agreement. Looking back, you would understand it was only a strategy changing shape.

You met Jason Todd in a safehouse kitchen at three in the morning with a knife in his hand and blood on his shirt. The blood was not all his. That seemed to be a theme with him.

You had been told the safehouse was empty. That was the first lie. The second was that Bruce had asked you to drop off containment samples there because the cave systems were compromised, which sounded plausible only because Batman had a lifelong commitment to making logistical nightmares seem professional. You let yourself in through the back with the access code Bruce had given you, carrying a sealed case of Lazarus residue samples and a paper bag from a twenty-four-hour diner because Alfred had muttered something about you forgetting to eat.

Jason was standing in the kitchen when you entered, shirt half-unbuttoned, helmet on the counter, dark curls wet from rain or sweat or both. He had a combat knife in one hand, and a look in his eyes that made the whole room feel suddenly smaller.

You froze. He froze.

Then he looked you up and down, slow and unimpressed. “You the delivery guy?”

You lifted the sealed case. “Do I look like the delivery guy?”

“You look like someone who should know better than to walk into my safehouse.”

“I was told it was empty.”

Jason’s mouth twisted. “Yeah, well. People lie.”

You thought of Bruce and nearly laughed. Instead, you set the case down carefully on the table. “I’m working the Lazarus contamination case.”

His expression changed by half a degree. With Jason, you would learn, half a degree was basically a monologue. “With B?”

“With Batman,” you said, because you had not earned the right to make that wound casual.

Jason saw the distinction. Of course he did. His eyes sharpened. “And you are?”

You gave him your name.

He waited.

“That’s usually where people say theirs,” you added.

“You broke into my kitchen.”

“Technically, I used a code.”

“That makes it worse.”

“Fair.”

He stared at you for another long second, knife still loose in his hand. Then his gaze dropped to the diner bag. “That food?”

“Yes.”

“For me?”

“Alfred said someone here would be unpleasant if unfed.”

Jason blinked. Then, to your surprise, he laughed. It was a rough little thing, dragged out of him against his will. “That old man’s a menace.”

“I’m getting that.”

He set the knife down.

Not far. Not out of reach.

But down.

It should not have felt like something.

It did.

The first thing you noticed about Jason was that his pain did not ask politely to be seen.

Jason’s pain was a house fire. It filled the room even when he smiled. It lived in the set of his shoulders, in the way his eyes tracked exits, in the fury that rose too quickly when fear touched it, in the green-black pulse beneath his skin that was not emotion exactly but something older and uglier wearing emotion as armour. The Lazarus Pit in him felt like standing near a storm drain during a flood: a pull under the surface, a pressure that wanted to drag everything down.

Your power reacted before you gave it permission.

That frightened you. Not because Jason seemed monstrous. He did not. That was the problem. He felt violently, painfully human beneath the contamination, and the part of you that had first manifested your gift for an injured alley cat wanted to reach for him with both hands.

You did not. You sat across from him at the kitchen table while he ate fries with the intensity of someone pretending not to be starving. He watched you watching him.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“You got a face.”

“Most people do.”

“Yours is doing a thing.”

You looked down at your untouched coffee. “I was trying to decide whether asking about the blood would get me stabbed.”

Jason glanced at his shirt. “Not mine.”

“Congratulations.”

“Some mine.”

“Less congratulations.”

His mouth twitched.

You should not have liked him so quickly. Jason Todd was all sharp edges and guarded spaces, sarcasm like barbed wire, eyes that dared people to come close just so he could prove they would regret it. But he was also the kind of man who ate diner fries from a paper bag in a safehouse kitchen at three in the morning and quietly slid the second burger toward you when he noticed you were not drinking your coffee.

“Eat,” he said.

“I’m fine.”

“Didn’t ask.”

“That’s rude.”

“That’s dinner.”

You stared at the burger, then at him. He looked away first, pretending to study the rain streaking down the dark window.

You ate.

He did not smile, but he looked less irritated by existence afterwards.

That was how it began: not with comfort, not exactly, but with a burger offered like a challenge and a knife left close enough to matter but not close enough to threaten.

Bruce kept assigning you to the same routes after that. Not openly. He was subtler than that, which somehow made it worse. A contaminated weapons cache in Crime Alley. A possible victim near Jason’s territory. A safehouse debrief Red Hood “might attend.” You were not stupid. Neither was Jason, though his suspicion aimed itself mostly at Bruce and therefore missed, for a while, the exact nature of the trap.

“You and B joined at the hip now?” Jason asked one night from the roof of a closed pawn shop, where the two of you were watching a suspected Lazarus courier enter a bar across the street.

You were crouched beside an air-conditioning unit, cold wind cutting through your jacket. “No.”

“Could’ve fooled me.”

“I work cases involving emotional destabilisation and meta-chemical contamination. This case has both.”

“Fancy way of saying you’re here because people are losing their minds.”

You looked at him. “People don’t lose their minds. They get overwhelmed. There’s a difference.”

Jason’s helmet turned toward you. You could not see his face, but you felt his attention settle heavier than before. “That your professional opinion?”

“Yes.”

“What’s your unprofessional opinion?”

“That Gotham has a bad habit of calling people crazy when it means inconvenient.”

The silence that followed had teeth.

Then Jason said, “Careful. Talk like that and the Bats might start liking you.”

“Too late. Alfred gave me biscuits.”

“Shit. You’re family now.”

You laughed before you could stop yourself.

Jason looked away quickly, but not before you caught the slight tilt of his helmet, the surprise of it. Like he had not meant to make you laugh. Like he had not expected to want to do it again.

You did not use your power on him. You did not reach into him, did not quiet the Pit, did not smooth the rage when it rose. When his breath hitched after exposure to residue, you kept your hands to yourself. When his fingers tightened around his gun until the leather of his gloves creaked, you stood near but did not touch. When he paced a safehouse like a caged thing after a bad fight, you sat on the counter and talked about books until he either told you to shut up or threw one at you.

But your power had always been more than touch. It lived in your voice when you softened it. In your proximity when you let yourself care too loudly. In the air around you when someone’s pain called to yours and your body answered before your ethics could catch up. You did not direct it at Jason, but sometimes the room got warmer. Sometimes his shoulders loosened after twenty minutes beside you. Sometimes the green edge in his presence receded by a fraction, and he would blink like he had just remembered the world did not have to be fought every second.

You told yourself that was not the same thing.

You were lying. Maybe not the way Bruce had lied. Not with plans and omissions and a chessboard where his son’s pain had become a problem to solve. Your lie was softer. Worse, maybe, because it came wrapped in tenderness. You wanted Jason to sleep. You wanted the tremor to leave his hands. You wanted his laugh to come easier. You wanted the Pit to stop using his body like an old crime scene.

You wanted to help. Gotham was built on horrible things done by people who wanted to help.

Jason got close to you like a stray animal deciding the porch light was not a trap. Slowly. Suspiciously. With a lot of biting.

He started appearing when Bruce had not assigned either of you anywhere, leaning in the doorway of your temporary apartment with takeout and a scowl.

“You eat today?”

You looked up from the case files spread across your floor. “Hello to you too.”

“That a no?”

“That is none of your business.”

“So no.”

He stepped inside without waiting for permission because he was rude, then paused halfway through the motion and glanced back at you, jaw tight. Waiting.

It took you a second to understand.

The big, terrifying Red Hood, crime lord of Crime Alley, had remembered to ask with his body even when his mouth forgot.

You softened. “You can come in, Jason.”

He grunted, like permission was annoying because it mattered, and entered.

He learned your tells, too. That was the danger of him. People underestimated Jason’s perception because he wore anger like a warning sign large enough to distract from everything else. But he noticed. He noticed when your fingers went numb after helping contaminated victims. Noticed when you smiled too quickly after a debrief. Noticed when Bruce’s voice got careful and your shoulders rose half an inch. Noticed when you did not eat unless someone put food directly in front of you.

So he put food in front of you. Aggressively.

One night, after you spent two hours calming a girl who had been dosed with Lazarus residue and kept screaming that her dead brother was calling from the walls, Jason drove you back to your apartment in silence. You were cold all the way through, coat wrapped tight around your body, hands tucked under your arms. You had used your power with permission. The girl had begged for help. You had given it.

Jason had watched from the doorway.

He had not said anything until you were inside. Then he took one look at you trying to unlock your door with shaking fingers, gently pushed your hand aside, and unlocked it himself.

“I had it,” you muttered.

“You were about to fight the keyhole and lose.”

“Rude.”

“Accurate.”

Inside, he made tea with the grim competence of a man who had survived on worse things than caffeine and spite. He placed the mug in front of you, then draped his leather jacket over your shoulders without asking. You should have objected. You did not. It smelled like smoke, rain, gun oil, and something faintly warm underneath that was only Jason.

He leaned against the counter, arms folded. “That what happens every time?”

“What?”

“You go all corpse-cold after doing your Care Bear routine?”

You huffed a laugh into the mug. “Care Bear routine?”

“Don’t dodge.”

You looked down at the tea. Your reflection trembled faintly on the surface. “Not every time.”

“Lie.”

“Sometimes.”

“Better.”

You were too tired to be careful. “It depends how much pain there is.”

Jason’s face shifted.

You realised the mistake too late.

“How much pain,” he repeated.

“It’s not— I don’t take it exactly.”

“But you feel it.”

You stared into the tea. Jason swore quietly.

“It’s not as bad as you’re thinking,” you said.

“Considering you don’t know what I’m thinking, that’s a dumbass thing to say.”

“You think loudly.”

“Yeah? What am I thinking now?”

That Bruce was right and wrong at the same time, you thought. That Jason was angry because anger was easier than fear. That he wanted to ask whether you had ever used it on him but did not yet know there was a question to ask. That some part of him, the part that had been treated like a weapon by enemies and family alike, knew something in this whole arrangement was rotten even if he could not see where.

You said none of that.

“You’re thinking I should eat something,” you said.

Jason narrowed his eyes.

Then he opened your fridge. It was, tragically, mostly condiments and one heroic apple.

He stared inside for a long moment. “This is a hate crime.”

“It’s minimalism.”

“It’s a cry for help.”

“You’re very dramatic.”

He closed the fridge. “I’m ordering food.”

“You don’t have to.”

“Didn’t ask.”

The warmth in your chest then was not your power.

That was the problem. Somewhere between stakeouts and diner bags, between his sarcasm and your tired smiles, between the way he never called you soft like it was an insult and the way you never looked at him like rage made him less worthy of tenderness, Jason became more than Bruce’s son, more than Red Hood, more than the case’s unspoken centre of gravity.

He became Jason. He became the man who read battered paperbacks while sitting on your fire escape because he claimed your apartment was too quiet. He became the person who fixed your loose window lock without mentioning it. He became the voice saying “You good?” in your comm after every mission, rough and casual and not casual at all. He became the one who called you Sunshine like an insult until one night it slipped out soft and both of you pretended not to notice.

He became dangerous to want. Because wanting made you selfish. Because sometimes, when the Pit scraped under his skin and his eyes went distant, you let the room warm by a degree.

Just a degree. Just enough.

The field mission that ruined everything took place beneath the old Monarch Theatre. The building had been abandoned since No Man’s Land, left to rot in a neighbourhood that had learned not to look too closely at places with locked doors and fresh tyre tracks. The Lazarus compound had been moving through the city in coded shipments, and every trail led back to the theatre’s flooded basement, where some offshoot of the League had apparently decided Gotham needed one more basement full of bad decisions.

Bruce wanted Batman and Robin on the perimeter. Jason told him to go to hell.

Bruce told him he was compromised. Jason told him to go to hell twice, with better punctuation.

You ended up in the passenger seat of Jason’s car, watching rain streak across the windshield while he drove with one hand and checked his gun with the other like a man actively trying to shorten Bruce’s lifespan through stress.

“You know,” you said, “when Batman says someone is compromised, usually there’s at least a little data behind it.”

Jason snorted. “B says compromised when he means disobedient and emotionally inconvenient.”

“Those are different things.”

“Tell him that.”

You looked at him. The greenish glow of passing traffic lights moved over his face, catching the white streak in his hair, the hard line of his jaw, the bruise half-hidden near his temple. “Are you?”

“Am I what?”

“Compromised.”

His hand tightened on the wheel. For a second, you felt it. The Pit, restless under his skin, reacting to the name without being named. A dark tide under a locked door.

“No,” he said.

The lie sat between you, breathing.

You did not challenge it. That was your mistake.

The theatre basement smelled like mould, rust, old velvet, and chemical rot. Water pooled ankle-deep across the cracked floor, reflecting the sickly green glow of containment tanks set up beneath the stage. League symbols marked the walls in black paint. Men in tactical gear moved between crates, their veins lit faintly green beneath their skin. Not League proper, you realised quickly. Deserters, maybe. Fanatics. People scavenging from sacred horrors and pretending that made them priests.

Jason was quiet in the way he got before violence. Not calm. Never calm. Focused. The difference mattered.

You moved through the shadows behind him, one hand near your belt, the other gloved and flexing at your side. Your job was to stabilise victims if any were present. That was what Bruce had said. That was what you told yourself.

Then Jason saw the tank. It was smaller than the others, built upright like a coffin, full of green liquid and suspended wires. Inside floated a body. Not alive. Not fully dead either, maybe. A failed resurrection. A test subject. A boy, no older than fifteen, with dark hair drifting around his pale face.

Jason stopped moving.

The whole basement changed. You felt the Pit in him wake. It turned inside him like something with teeth, recognising itself in the glow, in the rot, in the impossible wrongness of a body kept between states. Jason’s breath hitched once. His gun lowered by an inch. Then his shoulders went rigid, and the air around him seemed to snap tight.

“Jay,” you whispered.

He did not answer.

One of the deserters spotted you. Shouted.

The basement erupted. Gunfire cracked against concrete. Jason moved like a storm given bones, violent and efficient and too fast, dropping the first three men before you had fully taken cover. You pulled two exposed civilians—lab techs, unwilling or not, you could not tell—behind a stack of crates and pressed warmth into the air with your voice, keeping them from panicking as bullets tore through the dark.

“It’s okay,” you said, though nothing was. “Stay low. Breathe. Hands over your head. Don’t move unless I tell you.”

Across the room, Jason slammed a man into the side of a tank hard enough to spiderweb the glass.

The man laughed.

“You’re proof it works,” he choked. “The dead can come back angry enough to be useful.”

Jason froze.

Then he hit him again. Harder.

“Jason!” you shouted.

He did not hear you. Or he did, and the Pit heard first.

The man’s head cracked against the glass. Once. Twice. The tank alarm began to shriek. Green light strobed across Jason’s face, and when he turned, his eyes were not glowing, not exactly, but the rage in them had gone bright and terrible, edged in something that was not fully his.

A deserter lunged at you from the side. You ducked too late. Pain burst across your shoulder as you hit the floor. Water soaked through your clothes. Your power flared instinctively, warming the terror of the civilians behind you, calming the attacker for half a second—long enough for you to kick his knee out and scramble back.

Jason saw you fall.

The Pit surged.

It was like being near a furnace door thrown open. He crossed the basement in three strides and put the attacker through a rotted wooden partition. The man went down hard, groaning, weapon skittering away. Jason grabbed him by the collar and lifted him again.

“Don’t,” you said.

Jason’s helmet had been knocked away in the fight. His face was bare. Wet hair clung to his forehead. Blood marked his mouth. His expression was not blank. That would have been easier. It was full of too much. Rage, fear, memory, death, the boy in the tank, you on the ground, Bruce’s voice in his comm telling him to stand down, all of it collapsing inward until there was only the hand around the man’s throat and the terrible need to make something stop.

“Jason,” you said again.

His fingers tightened. The man clawed at his wrist.

You knew, with absolute clarity, that Jason would hate you for what happened next. You also knew he would hate himself more if you let him kill that man while the Pit had its hands inside him. So you reached.

Not gently. There was no time for gentle.

Your power slammed into him across the flooded basement like a door blown open by light. Jason staggered as if struck. The man dropped from his grip, gasping, and crawled away. You pushed warmth into the green-black storm inside Jason, not to erase it, not to fix it, not to make him docile, but to quiet the thing that had wrapped itself around his choice and was squeezing.

Jason turned toward you.

The look on his face gutted you. He knew. The rage was still there. You could feel it trying to rise, huge and wounded and rightful. He wanted to be furious. He wanted to snarl, to curse, to demand what you had done, to shove your power back out of his skin with both hands.

But your comfort was already moving through him.

His breath steadied against his will. His shoulders lowered. The green edge in his eyes dulled. His anger hit the warmth you had poured into him and softened before it could become sound.

Horror entered his face. Not fear of the Pit.

Fear of you.

“What,” he said, voice too calm, too even, trembling underneath because the emotion had nowhere to go, “the fuck did you do?”

Your hand was still extended. You could feel him inside the reach of your power, feel the rage trying to form and being soothed, soothed, soothed before he could choose whether he wanted it eased. The wrongness of it hit you so hard you almost pulled back.

Then Jason’s gaze flicked to the fallen man. To the boy in the tank. To his own bloody hands.

His jaw clenched.

“Stop,” he said.

You tried. The second you loosened your grip on the power, the Pit roared back through him. Jason doubled over with a strangled sound, one hand going to his head, the other reaching blindly for the gun at his hip. Not aimed at anyone. Not yet. But the violence in the room answered him like an echo.

You pushed the warmth back in, sobbing once from the effort.

Jason went still again. Too still.

His eyes lifted to yours.

“You’re keeping me calm,” he said.

It was not a question.

You could barely breathe. “I’m keeping you here.”

“Don’t dress it up.”

“I’m sorry.”

His mouth twisted. You felt the apology hit him and fail to land. How could it? You were apologising while still doing the thing.

Somewhere behind you, Batman’s voice cracked through the comm. “Status.”

Jason’s eyes did not leave yours.

You said nothing.

Jason answered, voice level in a way that made the skin on your arms prickle. “Ask your specialist.”

Bruce went silent.

Jason laughed once. It sounded almost gentle, because your power would not let it sharpen properly.

That was worse. That was so much worse.

The rest of the fight ended around you in fragments. Batman and Robin breached from above. The deserters surrendered or fell. The tank systems were shut down. The boy inside was gone in the way bodies were gone when people had tried too hard to drag them back. You held the warmth around Jason until the Lazarus residue was contained, until the active compound stopped pulsing through the room, until the Pit inside him retreated from a roar to a low, hateful growl.

Only then did you let go.

Jason stumbled back like a cut string. For one suspended second, he simply stood there, breathing hard, staring at you with his own anger finally returning to him.

Then his face changed. The rage arrived.

Fully. His.

He looked almost relieved to feel it.

“You,” he said.

You took one step toward him. “Jason—”

“Don’t.”

The word cracked across the basement.

You stopped.

He looked past you at Batman, who had gone utterly still near the edge of the flooded stage. Damian stood behind him, sword lowered, eyes flicking between all three of you with the sharp, uncomfortable awareness of someone realising the adults had made a mess with consequences.

Jason’s laugh came out raw this time. No magic softening it. No warmth sanding down the edge. “You knew.”

Batman said nothing.

Jason’s eyes burned. “Course you did.”

“Jason,” Bruce said.

“No.” Jason pointed at him, hand shaking. “No, you don’t get to do the voice. You don’t get to stand there like this is a mission that got complicated.”

You felt cold spreading through you now, the aftershock of overuse. Your knees trembled. You barely noticed. Jason’s hurt filled the basement louder than any alarm.

He looked back at you. The anger in his face almost broke you because underneath it was betrayal so young it might as well have had dirt from a grave still under its nails.

“How long?” he asked. Your throat closed. “How long have you been doing that to me?”

“I haven’t—”

His eyes flashed.

You stopped. Started again, worse and more honest. “Not like tonight.”

Jason went very still.

Batman’s head turned toward you. You ignored him.

“I didn’t target you,” you said, voice shaking. “Not deliberately. Not before tonight. But my power responds to pain, and yours—” You swallowed. “Yours is loud. Sometimes being near me probably helped. Sometimes I let it.”

Jason stared.

The silence after that was worse than shouting.

“So all those nights,” he said softly. “All those times I thought I could breathe around you.”

Your eyes burned. “That was still you.”

“Don’t.”

“It was.”

“Don’t you dare.”

You flinched.

Jason stepped closer, not enough to threaten, but enough that every line of him felt like a wound held upright by fury. “I thought I was getting better.”

“You are.”

His laugh was vicious. “Was I?”

“Yes.”

“Or were you just putting a blanket over the monster so nobody had to look at it?”

“You’re not a monster.”

“You don’t get to decide that either.”

The words struck like a slap. You had no answer.

Jason looked at Bruce again. “This your plan?”

“Jason—”

“This why they’re here?” His voice rose. “You bring in your little miracle worker to fix the bad Robin? Make me quieter? Easier? Less embarrassing at family dinners?”

“That’s not what this is,” Bruce said, but there was guilt in his voice, and Jason heard it like a gunshot.

“Bullshit.”

Damian said, “Todd—”

“Stay out of it.”

For once, Damian did.

Jason backed away from all of you, shaking his head. His anger was wild now, but it belonged to him, and you understood with terrible clarity why he clung to it. After what you had just done, anger was proof he still had something no one else could touch.

“I didn’t agree to this,” he said.

You felt tears slip down your face. “I know.”

“I didn’t ask you to save me.”

“I know.”

“You don’t get to crawl inside my chest and turn the volume down because you’re scared of what I’ll do.”

“I know.”

“Then why did you?”

The question broke open in the basement, raw and enormous.

Because Bruce asked, at first, some ugly part of you thought. Because you were afraid. Because the Pit was eating his choice alive. Because you loved him. Because you had wanted to help for so long that you had stopped asking whether help without consent was just another kind of harm.

You said the only answer that did not try to make you look better.

“Because I thought I knew better than you.”

Jason’s face changed.

It hurt him that you told the truth. Good, maybe. Terrible, definitely.

“And because I care about you,” you said, quieter. “But that doesn’t make it right.”

“No,” he said. “It really fucking doesn’t.”

Your legs nearly gave then. You grabbed the edge of a crate, fingers slipping on wet metal.

Jason saw. He looked like he hated that he saw.

His body moved half an inch toward you before he stopped himself with visible effort. Even furious, even betrayed, even gutted by what you had done, some part of him still wanted to catch you.

That was what finally made you cry.

Jason’s expression shuttered. He reached down, picked up his helmet from the flooded floor, and put it on. The red faceplate came between you like a door slamming shut.

“Tell B to find a new specialist,” he said.

Then he left.

The cave was silent after Jason’s departure in a way you imagined battlefields were silent after everyone had stopped pretending victory was clean.

You sat on the medbay cot with a blanket around your shoulders, IV fluids running into your arm because Alfred had taken one look at you and said, very calmly, “Sit down before I make Master Bruce regret several of his life choices in chronological order.” You had sat. Bruce had not argued. Damian had disappeared somewhere, likely to report to the others or sharpen something in disapproval.

Bruce stood across from you, hands braced against the counter, head bowed.

You stared at him.

“No,” you said.

He looked up. Whatever he saw in your face made him go still.

“No,” you repeated, because the word was the only thing keeping you from falling apart. “You don’t get to be quiet right now.”

Bruce’s jaw tightened. “You need to recover.”

“You used me.”

His expression fractured, but not enough. Not yet.

“You knew he wouldn’t agree,” you said. “You knew if you told him what I could do and why you wanted me near him, he would tell you to go to hell. So you put me in his path and let the case do the rest.”

“I didn’t ask you to use your powers without consent.”

“You built a situation where you hoped I would.”

Bruce flinched.

There. There it was.

The truth beneath the strategy.

You laughed weakly, coldly. “God, you’re good. You didn’t even have to order it. You just put everyone in the right places and trusted fear to make the choice for you.”

“I was trying to protect him.”

“You were trying to control him.”

Bruce’s face hardened.

You had seen Batman’s anger before. It was a terrible thing, disciplined and glacial, sharpened by righteousness. But you were too tired to fear it.

“He almost killed someone,” Bruce said.

“And now he gets to wonder whether the only reason he didn’t is because someone violated him.”

The anger left Bruce like air from a punctured lung.

You pulled the blanket tighter around your shoulders. “He was fighting it before I touched him. Did you see that? Did you actually see him, or were you too busy waiting for proof that he needed intervention?”

Bruce said nothing.

“He was fighting it,” you whispered. “The Pit was loud, but he was still there. I should have trusted him longer. You should have trusted him period.”

That one landed.

Bruce turned away.

For a long while, the only sounds were the hum of the cave and the slow drip of water somewhere in the dark.

“What did it feel like?” Bruce asked eventually. You looked at him. “When you used your power on him,” he said. His voice was rough. “What did it feel like?”

You closed your eyes. Jason’s rage. Jason’s horror. Jason trying to get angry and finding your warmth wrapped around the anger before he could choose it.

“Like holding a door shut while someone was trapped on the other side,” you said. Bruce’s face went pale. “Does that sound like help to you?”

He did not answer.

You slid the IV from your arm before he could stop you.

“Where are you going?”

“To apologise.”

“He won’t want to see you.”

“I know.”

“You should rest.”

You looked at him then, and maybe for once he saw why Jason had been so angry. How awful it was to have someone decide your needs for you and call it love.

“Don’t,” you said.

Bruce stepped back.

You left the cave with Alfred’s coat around your shoulders and Jason’s hurt still burning in your hands.

Jason did not answer the first time you knocked. Or the second. The third time, something heavy hit the inside of the door hard enough to rattle the frame.

“Go away.”

His voice was rough. Not helmet-filtered. Bare.

You stood in the hallway of his safehouse building with Alfred’s coat wrapped around you and a paper bag of food slowly cooling in your hand. It was nearly dawn. Crime Alley had that bruised, grey look it got before the city remembered to be cruel again. Somewhere down the hall, a radiator clanked like an old ghost with unfinished business.

“I brought food,” you said.

Silence.

Then, “Are you fucking kidding me?”

“No.”

“You think soup fixes this?”

“No.”

“Then why are you here?”

Because I love you, you thought, but that felt like the kind of truth that asked for something, and you had no right to ask.

“Because you were right,” you said.

The hallway went quiet.

You rested the paper bag against your hip because your hands were shaking again. Not from power use now. From fear.

“I’m not here to make you forgive me,” you continued. “I’m not here to explain it until it sounds better. It doesn’t sound better. I used my power on you without consent. Before tonight, I let it help you in ways you didn’t know about. Maybe not like that, maybe not directly, but enough that you’re allowed to feel violated by it. You asked if your progress was real, and I know I don’t get to be the person who answers that for you right now.”

Nothing.

“I’m sorry,” you said, voice breaking. “Not because you found out. Because I did it.”

Behind the door, you heard movement.

Then Jason said, “Did Bruce send you?”

“No.”

“Did he know you came?”

“Yes.”

“Did he try to stop you?”

“Yes.”

A pause.

“Good.”

Despite everything, a miserable little laugh left you. “Yeah.”

The door opened. Jason stood there in sweatpants and a black T-shirt, barefoot, hair a mess, eyes bloodshot. He looked exhausted. Human. Furious. Beautiful in the worst possible way, because your heart clearly had no self-preservation instincts and deserved to be studied by professionals.

His gaze dropped to the food. “What is it?”

“Soup.”

His mouth twisted.

“And bread,” you added.

He stared at you. You stared back.

Finally, he stepped aside. Not much. Just enough.

You entered carefully, because every inch of his space felt like a privilege you had lost and been loaned temporarily under strict supervision. His apartment was dim, curtains drawn, books stacked in unstable towers near the couch, weapons cleaned and arranged on the kitchen table with the tenderness some people reserved for family photos. There was a cracked mug in the sink. A blanket on the couch. A helmet on the floor by the window, faceplate turned away.

Jason closed the door.

You set the food on the counter. Neither of you moved toward it.

For a moment, the apartment was full of everything you had ruined.

Jason leaned back against the door, arms folded. “You gonna do it now?”

Your stomach dropped. “Do what?”

“Make this easier.”

“No.”

“You sure? I’m real fucking upset. Must be uncomfortable for you.”

You deserved that. 

You nodded. “It is.” His eyes narrowed. “But I’m not going to touch it,” you said. “Not your anger. Not your pain. Not anything. I don’t care if I’m uncomfortable. It’s yours.”

Jason looked away first. The muscle in his jaw jumped.

You swallowed. “I know that’s late.”

“Yeah,” he said. “It is.”

He dragged both hands over his face, then pushed away from the door and paced toward the window. His whole body looked like it wanted a fight and could not find one that would not make the hurt worse.

“I thought it was me,” he said. The words were quiet enough to bruise. “I thought I was doing better. Around you. Sleeping more. Not snapping so fast. Not feeling like my skin was trying to crawl off every time the Pit got loud. I thought—” He laughed, low and ugly. “I thought maybe I was healing. Stupid, right?”

“No.”

He turned on you. “Don’t.”

“It wasn’t stupid.”

“You don’t get to comfort me.”

“I’m not using my power.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

You shut your mouth.

Jason breathed hard through his nose, eyes bright with anger he was finally allowed to feel. “I thought I was safe with you.”

Your eyes filled. You did not let yourself look away.

“You were,” you said, then immediately shook your head. “No. That’s not fair. You weren’t safe from me. I wanted you to be, but wanting didn’t make it true.”

Jason stared at you like that answer had gone somewhere neither of you expected.

You kept going before fear could stop you. “You were right in the basement. I don’t get to decide you’re not a monster. I don’t get to decide what parts of your pain matter or what parts should go quiet. I don’t get to make you easier because I care about you.”

His face tightened.

“You’re not an episode,” you said. “You’re not something to manage. You’re not Bruce’s failure with a pulse. You’re Jason. And I should have treated your anger like it belonged to you even when it scared me.”

Jason’s eyes went wet. He looked furious about it.

“You and Bruce talk about me like I’m a bomb,” he said. “Like sooner or later I’m gonna go off and prove everyone right.”

He looked away, breathing unevenly.

For a while, neither of you spoke.

Then he said, “Was any of it real?”

You had expected the question. It still hurt worse than expected.

“My feelings were real,” you said. “My choices were the problem.”

Jason’s laugh broke halfway through. “That sounds like something a therapist would say right before charging two hundred bucks.”

“I can try saying it worse.”

“Please don’t.”

A tiny, awful smile tugged at your mouth and vanished. Jason saw it. His expression cracked for half a second, not into forgiveness, not into softness, but into grief. Like he missed you already and hated you for being in the same room.

“Did B call me broken?” he asked.

“No.”

Jason’s eyes sharpened.

“He thought it,” you admitted. “Or close enough. He wanted you safer. Quieter. Less hurt. He didn’t say fix, not exactly, but he meant it somewhere underneath.”

Jason nodded once, sharp and unsurprised. “And you?”

You looked at him. He held your gaze like he needed the answer and dreaded it in equal measure.

You could have said no. You could have said you never thought of him as broken. It would have been almost true.

Almost.

“At first,” you said, hating yourself with every word, “I thought of the Pit as something I could help quiet.”

Jason’s face closed.

“But I didn’t understand what that meant,” you continued quickly. “I thought if I could take away the worst of it, I was helping you. I didn’t think enough about the fact that I was deciding what counted as worst.”

“Yeah,” he said coldly. “You didn’t.”

“No.”

He looked down at his hands.

You wanted to touch him so badly your fingers ached.

You did not move. That was all you could offer now: the absence of taking.

Jason noticed. He always noticed. It made him angrier, maybe. Or sadder. Sometimes those were cousins in his body.

“Why does it not work on you?” he asked abruptly.

You blinked.

His gaze lifted. “Your power. You give everybody else the warm fuzzy bullshit. Why do you look like death every time?”

The question knocked the breath out of you. “That’s not—”

“Don’t lie.”

You closed your mouth.

Jason’s voice roughened. “I’m pissed at you. Doesn’t mean I stopped noticing.”

That was unfair. That was Jason.

You looked down at your hands. “It manifested because I was alone. When I was younger. I wanted someone to comfort me so badly that it felt like my chest was going to crack open. No one came. An injured cat did. I wanted it to feel safe, and then it did.” You swallowed. “After that, I could give comfort to other people. Animals. Anyone, if they let me. But it only goes outward.”

Jason was very still.

“I can make someone feel like the next minute is survivable,” you whispered. “I can’t make myself believe it.”

The apartment changed. Not magically. You kept your power locked down so tightly it hurt. But Jason’s anger shifted around the new information, not gone, not softened, just forced to make room for another wound.

“That’s fucked,” he said.

A laugh escaped you, startled and wet. “Yeah.”

“Real eloquent, I know.”

“No, it’s accurate.”

Jason looked at the floor, jaw tight. “So Bruce found the one person in Gotham who can comfort everybody except themselves and decided, yeah, let’s use that.”

“He was scared for you.”

“I don’t care.”

“I know.”

“No, I mean I don’t care why he did it. Fear doesn’t make it less shitty.”

You breathed in slowly. “You’re right.”

“And you.” His voice cracked on the words, anger struggling under hurt again. “You don’t get a pass because you were lonely.”

“I know.”

“You don’t get to be sad enough that my consent stops mattering.”

“I know.”

Jason stared at you. You let him.

Eventually, he dragged a hand through his hair and looked toward the counter. “Soup’s getting cold.”

You blinked.

He glared. “Don’t make that face.”

“What face?”

“That kicked-puppy, hopeful face.”

“I’m not.”

“You are. It’s annoying.”

You looked down quickly.

Jason swore under his breath. Then he walked to the counter, unpacked the soup and bread with jerky, irritated movements, and pushed one container toward you. “Eat.”

Your throat tightened. “Jason—”

“I’m still mad.”

“I know.”

“I don’t forgive you.”

“I know.”

“I might not.”

Your fingers curled around the warm container. “I know.”

He looked at you, eyes dark and tired and unbearably alive. “But you look like you’re gonna fall over, and I don’t want that on my floor.”

A tear slipped down your cheek.

He pointed at you with a spoon. “Don’t make it weird.”

You laughed, brokenly. He looked away, but not before you saw his mouth tremble.

You ate soup in silence on opposite sides of his kitchen.

It was not forgiveness. It was not absolution. It was not even peace. But it was food. Warmth you had not created. Care you had not earned by emptying yourself first. Jason sat across from you, furious and hurt and still there, and maybe that was the cruellest mercy of all.

He did not come back all at once. Jason Todd was not a door that opened because someone apologised properly. He was a city after a siege, checking every road for traps. He stopped answering your calls for a week, then answered one with “What?” so aggressively you nearly cried from relief. He refused to work cases with you, then appeared on a rooftop two buildings away during one of your field assignments and pretended that it did not count. He returned the jacket you had forgotten at his apartment washed, folded, and smelling like his detergent. There was a protein bar in the pocket with a sticky note that read: Eat before you faint, dumbass.

Bruce, to his credit or perhaps merely his survival instinct, tried to apologise to Jason. Jason broke his nose.

Alfred, you heard, allowed it.

You did not use your power on Jason again. Not once. Not when he was angry. Not when the Pit surged. Not when his hands shook after a contaminated weapons bust. Not when he looked at you like he hated you for being the person he wanted comfort from most. You learned the shape of restraint properly, not the soft, self-serving version you had practised before. You learned to sit on your hands. To ask with words instead of warmth. To let silence hurt. To let Jason be ugly with pain without trying to make it beautiful enough for you to hold.

It was the hardest thing you had ever done. It was also the only apology that mattered.

Months later, he asked.

It happened in his apartment during a storm, because apparently Jason’s emotional breakthroughs required rain for dramatic integrity. The Lazarus compound case had ended three weeks before. The deserters were in custody. The modified residue had been neutralised. The boy from the tank had been buried under a name no one knew was his, with Jason standing far back beneath a tree while Bruce stood even farther away and looked like grief had invented new architecture inside him.

You and Jason were not fixed. But you were something.

You were sitting on his couch with a book in your lap, not reading, while Jason paced near the window with the restless energy of a man trying to outrun his own nervous system. His eyes had that green-edged brightness they got when the Pit was not loud enough to take him but loud enough to make staying in his body feel like a fight.

“You want me to go?” you asked softly.

“No.”

The answer came fast.

You nodded and stayed seated. He paced another line into the floor. Rain hit the windows hard enough to blur the city lights.

“Can you ask?” he said suddenly.

You looked up. Jason had stopped moving. He stood with his back to you, shoulders tense, hands flexing at his sides.

Your heart began to pound. “Ask what?”

His voice was rough. “You know what.”

You set the book aside carefully. “Jason.”

“Don’t make me say it if you already know.”

“I need you to say it.”

He turned then, anger flaring, but this time it was not at you. Not really. It was at the humiliation of need. At the vulnerability of wanting the very thing that had hurt him. At the terrible work of choosing something instead of having it chosen for him.

His jaw worked. Then, through clenched teeth, he said, “Ask me if I want help.”

Your eyes burned. You kept your voice steady. “Do you want me to use my power to help quiet the Pit?”

Jason closed his eyes. A tremor moved through him.

“Yes.”

“How much?”

His breath shook. “Not gone. Don’t make it gone.”

“I won’t.”

“Just enough that I can breathe.”

“Okay.”

“And if I say stop—”

“I stop.”

“Immediately.”

“Immediately.”

He opened his eyes. The trust there was not whole. It was not easy. It had scars and conditions and a knife hidden in its boot. But it was trust because he was choosing it, and because you understood now that choice was the whole sacred thing.

You held out your hand.

Jason stared at it for a long moment. Then he crossed the room and took it.

You let the power move slowly this time. Carefully. Not like the basement. Not like a door forced shut. More like opening a window in a room full of smoke. Warmth passed from your palm into his hand, then no farther than he allowed. You could feel the Pit recoil, restless and ugly, but you did not chase it. You did not smother it. You did not decide what Jason needed removed.

You gave him exactly what he asked for.

Jason’s breath caught. His fingers tightened around yours.

“Okay,” he whispered after a few seconds. “Stop.”

You stopped. The warmth withdrew immediately.

Jason swayed.

You did not grab him. He noticed that too.

After a moment, he sat beside you on the couch, not close enough to touch except for your still-linked hands. His breathing was uneven, but his eyes were clear.

“Was that me?” he asked.

The question was so quiet it nearly broke you.

You turned toward him. “Yes.”

His mouth twisted. “You sure?”

“Yes.”

“Because it feels easier to believe when I’m pissed at you.”

“I know.”

That earned you a tiny, reluctant huff.

Then he looked down at your joined hands. “I still hate what you did.”