#; lilacwrites

“Hey.” Dick’s voice jerks you back to reality with such force you actually flinch, and he frowns at you, sweet and concerned, and the pit in your stomach that screams its name is guilt feels like it could swallow you whole.

“I’m really sorry, Dick,” you whisper, smiling in a way that certainly does not reach your eyes, and Dick’s frown deepens. “I’ve been dealing with a lot lately, and I-“

“Do you… not wanna hang out anymore?” He asks, and that pit is replaced by a blinding panic.

“No! Oh my god, no, Dick, that’s- no,” you rush, climbing closer to him on his couch. It’s well-loved, comfy, fabric soft beneath your legs. Dick sighs in relief, a short huff of laughter.

“Oh thank god,” he murmurs, and his smile is so soft as he looks at you. “Was going to ask if you’d like to be my girlfriend tonight. That would’ve really thrown a dent in those plans.”

You blink at him, your knee brushing his thigh as you sit facing him, and his grin widens as he watches you process that very casual confession.

“Asshole,” you say, but you’re laughing, leaning closer, and Dick meets you halfway with ease, his lips slotting against yours, soft, sweet, and it just feels right.

“That a yes?” He asks with his lips still against yours, and you shove playfully at his chest. Your smiles are both radiant, enamoured, as he catches your wrists easily, using them to tug you in for another kiss.

That pit in your stomach remains, your intestines tying themselves in knots, but you do your best to ignore it. Dick Grayson is now your boyfriend.

Nightwing can kick rocks. Yeah, yeah, he can. You don’t even really know him! This is what you want — Dick’s lips on yours, a smile he can’t seem to wipe off on his face, your chest warm and heart fluttering.

You end up in his lap at some point, his hands on your waist, yours in his hair, making out like teenagers, but you’re happy. He keeps pulling back to look at you with a bright grin and soft eyes, laughing under his breath like he can’t believe his own luck, and it makes you smile, too, before the two of you are kissing again.

Inevitably, things shift, teeth catching on lips turning into soft little bites that are soothed with tongues, his hands slipping down to your hips when you absentmindedly grind down against him, making him groan, and he pulls away.

He’s fucking beautiful, mouth soft and kiss bitten, shining a little with shared spit, and his eyes have started to darken, his chest heaving a little as he looks at you.

“Can I take you to bed?”

You resolutely do not think about Nightwing when you nod.

© lilacwin-e :) do not repost as your own, copy, or run my works through any sort of ai.

Your lab ran late and you’re pissed at the world, and you just want to walk the ten minutes from campus to your shitty little one bedroom apartment, okay? You’re a born and raised Gothamite. Nothing Bludhaven throws at you could be that bad.

Except you duck down the alley, and there’s some guy with a rusty looking pocket knife, and his eyes brighten as soon as he sees you.

“No.” Possible-mugger looks shocked for all of a second before he steps closer, brandishing the knife a little more aggressively. With the long-suffering sigh of a trailer park mom who needs a cigarette, you pull a knitting needle out of your cute little baby pink plaid tote.

Possible-mugger stalls, balking, and then sneers.

“A knitting needle? C’mon, girlie, your purse can’t be worth your life.”

“You won’t be laughing when I shove this thing through your fucking eye,” you hiss, and someone snorts from above you.

Oh great.

Possible-mugger flinches, and whoever just landed as light as a cat behind you has him paling and taking off down the alleyway, so freaked out he trips over his feet and lands in a pile of garbage with a groan.

Nightwing — because of course it’s Nightwing — huffs under his breath and moves around you to zip tie the guy’s hands behind his back, turning to you with a quick little once over.

“…You alright?”

On any other day, you might have spared a moment to really take it in. Nightwing, coming to your rescue. You’ll give your best friend the appropriate hand-fanning, flustered fangirl when you call her later.

“Fine. Thanks.” Nightwing winces a little — Jesus, do I sound that upset?

“Rough day?” He asks, and you huff, the alleyway being illuminated in red and blue as a BPD car pulls in to the mouth.

And of course, because things couldn’t possibly get better, the heavens decide to open up.

“My yarn,” you whine, shucking off your jacket to protect your bag as much as possible, a pout on your lips, and you barely have a moment to make sure it’s secure and your yarn is safe before a strong arm is around your waist, and you’re being corralled into a doorway with one of those canvas overhangs. Dripping wet, you blink rainwater out of your lashes, and Nightwing is right there — looking at you.

“Uhm,” you say, clever as ever, and Nightwing flinches a little, knocked out of whatever revery he was in. “Thank you?”

“Oh, uh, yeah,” he says, also clever as ever, but you watch that signature charm of his slide back into place on his face as naturally as if it were the domino mask covering his eyes. “Your yarn should keep dry here.”

“Am I supposed to just wait in this doorway in the alley I was almost mugged in until the gods decide to stop the rain, or…?”

You look at him flatly, and his handsome face goes from superficial charm to… actual amusement, a laugh slipping past his (unfairly pretty) lips.

“Good point,” he says, and promptly turns on his heel to speak to one of the cops, wannabe mugger now cuffed in the back of the car.

He returns with a bright smile, brandishing an umbrella.

“I’ll walk you home,” he says, popping it open, and you miss the way his smile widens as you loose a soft, genuine laugh — he looks ridiculous.

“I can’t ask you to do that,” you say, but you’re already stepping under the cover of the umbrella, as if he’s your new centre of gravity, pulling you in.

He shrugs, and you don’t miss the way his shoulder and arm are getting drenched as he holds the umbrella over you. As if it’s the most logical thing in the world, you huff and snatch it from him, basically plastering yourself to his side so that the both of you are fully covered. He freezes, but recovers exceptionally fast, tilting his chin to give you an amused little curl of his mouth as you stare resolutely ahead, warm in the cheeks.

“My apartment is like, five minutes away,” you murmur, and that’s that.

Nightwing is walking you home.

You do give your friend the appropriate squealing, warm-faced, grinning-so-hard-your-cheeks-hurt recount of events when you get home, and something in your chest tightens when you see the umbrella — propped up next to your front door.

© lilacwin-e :) do not repost as your own, copy, or run my works through any sort of ai.

It’s starting to become a real problem, because you swear you’ve started seeing him out of the corner of your eye when you walk home after your late classes twice a week. It’s also a problem, because the guy you’ve been seeing for a couple weeks now has caught you in the middle of a thought about the vigilante. Again.

“Is everything okay?”

You blink, and Dick Grayson is leaning forward with a furrowed brow to look at you, concern swimming in those unfairly pretty blue eyes.

You really like Dick — he’s sweet, and funny, and attentive in a way that makes your skin crawl sometimes but he’s always soft with it, with the way he shows you he cares, that he’s been paying attention. You really, really like him.

The two of you met by chance in one of your biology labs earlier in the semester, Dick having to jump in to this one class to play catch up after missing his own lab earlier in the week. He took the empty spot across from you at the counter, and it just so happened that the experiment being run that day required partner work. You two hit it off, and the rest was history.

“Fuck- yes, I’m so sorry,” you splutter, pushing the heels of your hands into your eyes before offering him a weak smile. It does not help. “Just… a lot going on.”

Dick hums, eyes narrowing for half a second before he leans back in his seat, stretching his arms above his head.

Any and all guilty thoughts of Nightwing are dashed as soon as your eyes catch the strip of skin between his ridden up t-shirt and the waistband of his pants, and you resist the urge to check if you’ve drooled all over yourself.

Christ.

You shake yourself out of it, missing his smug little grin, and stare down at your textbook.

VSEPR Theory stares back. You are now resisting the urge to cry, scream, and/or rip the pages out of your textbook.

Instead, you groan, and pretend not to be pleased when Dick chuckles quietly from across the table. Making him laugh feels like a high you’ll never come down from.

The university library is fairly quiet in volume, considering midterms are approaching and it’s packed with panicking students, but you suppose that’s because university staff are circling the floors like hawks, rapid firing ‘shh’s at anyone who so much as looks like they’re about to make a noise louder than a mouse’s yawn.

Dick reaches over, and you short circuit for a moment, thinking he’s reaching for your hand. Disappointment strikes, though, as he slides your textbook out from underneath your palm and snaps it shut, offering you a charming little grin when you glance up at him.

“C’mon. We’ve been at this nearly all afternoon. We need food,” he whispers, packing up his stuff. “Let me buy you something to eat.”

“I can buy my own food,” you grumble, following suit, shoving things haphazardly into your tote bag.

He laughs softly and hands you the textbook he shut, and you frown up at him as you take it and slip it in your bag.

“I know that,” he says, soft, teasing, “but I want to get you something. Consider it study date part one and a half.”

You want to argue with that, but him so casually referring to your studying together as a date has your lips curling in a little unbidden smile.

“Fine,” you huff, but you’re smiling, and it only widens when you see that Dick is beaming at you, victorious.

Dick makes you laugh, and he knows how to flirt in a way that flusters you without making you recede into your shell, and he knows exactly when to turn the flirting from serious to corny just to see you laugh and relax a little under his attention.

So why do you keep thinking about Nightwing?

© lilacwin-e :) do not repost as your own, copy, or run my works through any sort of ai.

Amused, he tilts his head to the side and looks at you. “Hi. No wannabe mugger to threaten with a knitting needle today?”

“Nope,” you say, and then frown. You ran into him. That’s not right.

You take a step back, and a gasp is slipping past your lips.

Caught, he decides not to fake it anymore, and begins wobbling on his feet. More like swaying like a tree in the breeze.

“Can you walk? Should I call an ambulance? I- what the fuck!?”

He huffs, immediately shaking his head at the mention of an ambulance, and you mutter something about stupid stubborn vigilantes under your breath, tucking yourself under his shoulder on the side that isn’t currently leaking blood into the fabric of his suit, and try and take some of his weight as you hobble the short distance from the mouth of an alleyway — different to the first one you met in — to your apartment building.

Gary the security guard, bless his soul, does not look up from his trashy magazine as you chirp a hello and drag Nightwing to the elevator, only lifting a hand in greeting as you jab the button for your floor.

You’ve got the vigilante sat at your little round dining table, on your knees on the linoleum floor as you use your best scissors to cut at the Kevlar-reinforced fabric around his ribs. To your credit, it only takes a little bit of hacking to get the fabric out of the way.

Nightwing is looking at you intently as he slumps in your dining chair. (Well, you think he is. He might be passed out behind the domino mask, but he’s sat up enough that you think he’s conscious.)

He doesn’t flinch as you clean the gash with alcohol wipes from your cheap first aid kit, but he does breathe out the softest “pretty” that makes you freeze.

“Huh?”

“Y’re pretty,” he slurs, and you’re freaking the fuck out.

“Oh my god, I think you’ve lost a lot of blood,” you babble, abandoning the alcohol wipes for a clean wad of gauze, pressing it to the wound to try and staunch the flow of blood, your mind racing. Of course your brain decided the only reason Nightwing is calling you pretty is because he must be one pint of blood away from meeting the Grim Reaper. “Is there- what do I do? Can I call someone? You said no ambulance, I-“

You freeze again, because Nightwing is pressing a tiny little black something into your ear.

“Nightwing, do you read? Hello? Are you alive?”

“He’s- he’s in my kitchen,” you say to the strange female voice, trying not to pass out, your hands shaking with adrenaline where they push gauze into his wound.

“…you must be knitting needle girl,” she says, and you would fall flat on your ass if you weren’t already knelt on the ground in front of him.

“What!?”

Strange female voice in your ear huffs a laugh, and says “Explain to me the injury. I’ll walk you through what to do, and if you need to get him to a hospital. Don’t let him argue with you if I tell you to take him.”

You’re nodding, even though she can’t see, and forty-five minutes later, Nightwing is asleep on your couch, wound clean and covered with gauze and medical tape.

Oracle, as you’d learnt, is laughing softly in your ear as you have a crisis on your kitchen floor.

“Knitting needle girl!?” You whisper-shriek, head in your hands. “He called me ‘pretty’, Oracle. This can’t be happening to me. This can’t be my life.”

“He called you pretty when he told me about the first time you met, if that helps.”

You think about the alley, the shit day, the mugger and the knitting needle and the rain, and you scream into a throw pillow, Oracle laughing so loudly in your ear it almost sounds like she’s in the room with you.

“Okay, I need- I need to call my friend,” you mutter, and Oracle only hums as you pull the little black comm-piece out of your ear, scrambling across the floor to your bag where you’d dumped it at your front door, fishing through it for your phone.

Your friend, as always, picks up on the third ring.

“Nightwing is asleep on my couch,” you hiss, and there’s a moment of silence so long that you pull the phone away from your ear to check she hasn’t hung up on you.

She hasn’t, as evidenced by the sudden raucous laughter filtering through your speakers.

“I’m not kidding,” you whine, and she stops laughing immediately.

“What?”

“I ran into him in the alley by my place and he was hurt and he said no ambulance and so I brought him inside and then he was bleeding everywhere and he called me pretty and then Oracle was talking me through patching him up and now he’s asleep on my couch and he called me pretty-“ you say, the words falling out of you in a spectacular fountain of verbal diarrhoea. Your friend, to her credit, does not waver.

“Well. At least he’s not bleeding out anymore,” she says, and you groan, your head thunking against your front door, phone pressed to your ear. “And he called you pretty. I fail to see the issue.”

You can hear the smirk in her voice, and if you could throttle someone through the phone, you would. You open your mouth to hiss something scathing down the line, when the object of your crisis groans and shifts on your couch.

“Oh fuck, he’s waking up.”

Your friend just cackles and hangs up on you. Bitch.

You get a text from her a second later, that reads; ‘deep breaths. it’s fine.’

Followed by; ‘wait, when is the next time you’re seeing dick?’

Oh, fuck.

© lilacwin-e :) do not repost as your own, copy, or run my works through any sort of ai.