#dangerous!reader

The warehouse was a smoking ruin, fire crews still battling the embers. The op should’ve been surgical—quiet takedown, clean arrests. 

Instead, it had been an ambush.

Dick pulled off his mask, jaw tight, hair damp with sweat and soot. 

He paced in the shadows, trying to breathe past the storm in his chest. 

The whole time, he knew. 

He’d known something was wrong for weeks, but he hadn’t wanted to believe it.

And then he saw you.

“Funny,” he said, voice hoarse but steady. “Every time we get close, they’re waiting for us. Like clockwork.” He took a slow step toward you, his eyes narrowing. “You want to tell me why your clearance code shows up in their system logs?”

Your breath caught. “Dick—”

“Don’t.” His voice lashed out, sharper than a blade. “Don’t lie. Not again.”

You lifted your hands, a half-plea. “I never lied about us.”

“That’s supposed to make this better?” He barked a bitter laugh, running a hand down his face before looking at you again. His eyes—those bright, impossible eyes—were shattered. “Tell me how I’m supposed to separate the person I…” His throat closed around the word. “…the person I trusted from the mole who’s been bleeding me dry.”

You flinched. “I thought I was doing the right thing. At the start, I believed in it. The people I worked for—they said you couldn’t be trusted, that you were hiding things. That you were dangerous.”

“And you believed them.” The words were flat, but the pain in them was unmistakable.

“I believed them until you,” you said, desperate now, stepping closer. “Until I knew you. Every second I spent with you, every time you let me in—it tore me apart. Because I couldn’t stop falling for you. And I thought—I thought maybe I could have both. Do my job. Keep you safe.”

“Safe?” His laugh was sharp, humorless. “Do you have any idea what you’ve done? How many people could’ve died tonight because they knew we were coming?”

“I didn’t know they’d—”

“You didn’t care.” His voice broke on the word, and the silence after it cut deeper than any shout.

Your eyes burned. “I cared about you. That was never a lie. Everything I felt—every word, every touch—it was real. I never meant to hurt you.”

“Intentions don’t change the fact that you did.” His expression hardened, a mask slipping into place, but you could see the rawness underneath. “You didn’t just betray me. You betrayed us. You betrayed what we had before it even had a chance to be real.”

Your chest ached, a sob caught behind your ribs. “I didn’t know how to stop. I wanted to tell you, but—”

“But you didn’t.” He cut you off, voice low, final. “You chose them. You chose a mission over me. Over this.”

The silence was unbearable, broken only by the crackle of the dying fire. 

You wanted to close the distance, to grab his hand, to prove somehow that what you had wasn’t just ashes. 

But his eyes told you the truth: if you touched him now, he’d break.

So you stood there, trembling, while he turned away.

“Whatever this was—it’s done.” His words were quiet, heavy as stone.

And when he walked into the smoke, leaving you behind, you finally understood: the fastest fall always comes with the hardest landing.

You stood in the smoke long after he was gone. 

The world seemed muffled—sirens, shouting, the hiss of the firehose all dulled, like you were hearing them from underwater.

You pressed a shaking hand to your mouth, but it did nothing to stop the sob clawing up your throat.

It wasn’t supposed to be like this.

At the beginning, it had felt simple. 

Clear lines, clear orders. 

The mission mattered, justice mattered, and you told yourself Dick Grayson—Nightwing—was too dangerous to be left unchecked. 

That was what they’d told you, and you’d believed it. 

You wanted to believe it.

Until you met him.

Until the smile that reached his eyes undid you, until the warmth in his laugh made you ache, until the nights tangled in his sheets made you feel like—for the first time—you were more than a weapon in someone else’s war.

You’d fallen so fast, too fast, like diving headlong into fire.

And now you were burning.

Your stomach turned as you replayed his words. 

You didn’t just betray me. You betrayed us. 

He was right. 

You’d told yourself you could balance both sides, serve your mission and still keep him untouched. 

You’d lied to yourself long before you’d lied to him.

And now all you had left was the wreckage.

You slid down the cold brick of the alley wall, burying your face in your hands. 

For the first time, you questioned everything—your orders, your cause, yourself. 

Were you ever on the right side? 

Or had you been blinded by loyalty to the wrong people, the wrong ideals?

Or worse—had you been blinded by him?

Because even now, your chest still ached for him. 

Even now, your body still longed for his touch, your soul still leaned toward his like a flower bending toward the sun. 

Love hadn’t disappeared with his anger. 

It lingered, heavy and desperate, and that made it so much worse.

You had never lied about that.

But maybe love wasn’t enough.

Love had never made you gentle. 

It had made you reckless. 

Now it made you dangerous.

You waited until the safehouse was empty — until the early-morning quiet when the handlers thought you were asleep, when the city softened and every footfall felt distant. 

You moved like a shadow through the low light, boots silent on cracked linoleum, heart hammered loud enough to be a metronome for the rage inside you. 

You had not come to beg. 

Begging had been exhausted the moment Dick turned away. 

Begging didn’t fix a thousand small betrayals stacked into one catastrophic night.

They’d used you. 

That fact had a weight and a shape. 

It could be folded into a plan.

The kitchen smelled like burnt coffee and bleach. On the counter, a tablet glowed with the morning reports — innocuous lines of text that looked sterile until you remembered the bodies, the ambush, the faces Dick had made when he said, You chose them. 

You pulled up the contact list and scrolled until you found the name you wanted: Marlowe.

Marlowe’s voice on the line was calm, practiced. “Report,” he said.

You let the calm hang between you, keeping it clinical. “The op tonight was compromised. Why was my clearance flagged in the logs?”

A pause. 

Then, smooth: “Log entries can be forged. There are explanations.”

“Explanations don’t come with sirens and hollow eyes, Marlowe.” Your voice was steady. You were searching for a breach in his composure and finding none. He’d trained them well.

“You’re emotional,” he said. “Step back. We’ll debrief when it’s safe.”

You closed your eyes. 

You could have gone soft — pleaded for leniency, for context. 

Instead, you reminded yourself of the way Dick had looked at you: the grief, the finality. 

That expression was a map to everything you wanted to undo.

You leaned closer to the phone, letting the words you’d swallowed for months pour out like a blade. “You told me Nightwing was a threat,” you said. “You told me he was compromised. You told me to get close, report patterns, make him… manageable.”

There was a flicker in his voice now, a crack you hadn’t expected to find. “We told you he was a threat because he was getting ideas. Because he wasn’t playing by the rules.”

“He was doing the right thing.” The words came out rough. “He was trying to protect people. You fed me lies and called them justice. You fed me lines about ‘greater good’ until I repeated them like prayer. And while I believed you, I loved him.”

Silence, and then, dangerously soft: “Sentiment complicates things. You know the protocols.”

“I know enough.” You let the admission sit like a promise. “I know how your money moves. I know who signs off on what. I know how you scrub operatives when they get messy.” Your thumb skated over the tablet, bringing up a list of transfers, shell accounts, a chain of innocuous names that made your stomach turn. You hadn’t just been a mole; you’d been watching and learning in plain sight.

Marlowe’s reply was clipped. “You cross that line and you know what happens.”

“You taught me the line,” you said. “And you taught me where you hide the bodies if someone steps out of line.” You didn’t intend to say the last part until it left your mouth, but it landed like an icicle. You heard the intake of breath on the other end. You’d hit him where you knew it would hurt.

“You’ll regret this,” he warned.

You smiled, not unkindly. “Regret is a poor currency. I’m trading in currency you understand.” You’d memorized their threats, their safe words, the locations in the city mapped to their dead drops. You’d been cataloguing dirt for months, convincing yourself it was a professional necessity. Now it was leverage.

“Do you want them exposed?” you asked. “Because I can show people what you call collateral. I can show financial records, safehouses, call logs. I can show them the men in suits you wash clean in the daylight and the mouths you shut at night.” Your pulse thudded in your throat. Saying the things made them real; making them real made you less helpless.

“Listen to me,” Marlowe snapped. “You make a move and things escalate. People could die. Including him.”

Including him. 

The phrase landed like a fist. It was a threat wrapped in a warning. 

You imagined Dick — his jaw, the way his hands curled when he was trying to stay calm. 

If they wanted to hurt him, they would. 

That was the calculation you’d accepted when you first took the assignment. 

But acceptance and submission were different animals.

“You’ve already done that,” you said quietly. “You used him.” Then louder: “You used me.” The last syllables were accusation and release.

There was a rustle on the other end, a breathing that had lost its polish. 

You felt a feral, thin satisfaction; you had punctured the armor. 

Maybe you had only scared him. 

Maybe you had made an enemy of everyone who’d once been your lifeline. 

That was acceptable collateral.

“Stop,” Marlowe said at last. “Bring yourself in. We’ll debrief. We’ll—”

“No.” You stood, moving to the sink and splashing cold water on your face until the dizziness passed. You let the drop of water linger at your mouth like a vow. “I don’t think you deserve the courtesy of a debrief.”

A long silence. 

Then, slowly, the line went dead. 

The click echoed through the tiny kitchen like a verdict.

You hung up and opened the tablet to a new note. 

No contact list. 

No polite inventory. 

You typed names — small, bite-sized accusations — and attached the files you’d been saving: an offshore transaction, a surveillance log that contradicted a public statement, a recording of a phone call you’d made months ago when they’d given you the order to get close. 

Each file was a grain of sand in a machine that had run too long without friction.

You hit send.

The emails pinged out to journalists you’d cultivated under the pretense of feeding them small crumbs: a disgruntled informant, a leaker with inside access. 

You had been careful not to burn your sources; you’d kept them loyal with just enough truth to taste. 

Now those crumbs would become a trail.

A chair scraped. 

You spun, instinct popping your shoulders into defensive stance. 

Marlowe stood in the doorway, flanked by two others, faces hard as granite. 

You had thought you were quiet enough to move unseen. 

You had miscalculated. 

Or — and here was a new, colder possibility — you had let them find you so they’d underestimate what you’d do next.

“You call that a move?” Marlowe’s mouth tilted. “Sending files to reporters is theater. It will make noise. Noise is manageable. We deal in permanence.”

“You always think you control the narrative,” you said. “You always think you can bury what doesn’t suit you.”

He stepped closer, and your body remembered every lesson they’d taught you about handling a threat: eye contact, breathing, how to make a threat seem less like whining and more like inevitability. 

You were not the same person who had taken orders with a nod. 

You had been remade by love and by loss.

“You’ll come with us,” Marlowe said.

You laughed, the sound raw. “Or what? You’ll detain me? Kill me?”

“Both,” he said, unflinching.

“Then do it,” you said. “But if you so much as touch him, I will make sure the first headline his name ever gets isn’t about masks and heroics. I’ll make it about you. About every scrap you’ve hidden.” You could feel your pulse in your throat, but your voice didn’t waver. “And I’ll make sure the people I trusted in the press — the ones who owe me favors — will not stop until every piece of your empire is exposed.”

Marlowe’s jaw worked. 

For a wild second you thought he might come forward and take you up on the threat. 

Instead, he turned his head and barked an order. 

The two men who’d been with him moved in.

You moved first.

You’d been taught nonlethal takedowns that were efficient and quick; you used them with a surgeon’s precision, sliding behind one, catching his wrist, twisting until he was on the floor with a breath knocked out of him. The other lunged; you sidestepped, your palm finding the place behind his ear you’d been shown in training. He crumpled.

Marlowe’s hand came for a sidearm. You didn’t wait for the muzzle flash. You grabbed the table, launched it between you, sending pens and a coffee mug skittering across the floor. The noise bought you a sliver of chaos; you used it to slip past him, out the back door, into the alley where the city watched with indifferent light.

You ran with the taste of metal and ash in your mouth. 

You didn’t run to hide. 

You ran to someone who would make your next move easier to keep: a contact in the docks with a boat, a man who had a blind spot for people with too much smoke in their eyes. 

You had money stashed in shell accounts you no longer honored. 

You had friends you’d called favors from when you needed something ugly done. 

Now those favors were IOUs you were cashing in on the only currency that mattered: leverage.

By dawn the files were live on at least three reputable news sites. 

Journalists called. 

Marlowe called. 

Your phone buzzed with threats and pleas and the names of men who suddenly realized their comfortable world had termites gnawing at the beams. 

You answered none of them. 

You sat in a cramped room above a harbor with the city tilting slowly awake and thought of Dick.

You didn’t know if he’d ever look at you the way he had before. 

You didn’t know if he’d come after you to kill or to beg. 

You only knew you couldn’t go back to the person who had taken orders and swallowed the consequence. 

You’d traded one kind of duty for another: protect the man who had unintentionally made you more human, even if it meant burning the rest of the world to ash.

Outside, a headline blinked on a laptop screen: Shadow Network Exposed — High-Ranking Operatives Named. The photograph that accompanied it was a grainy still of a suited man stepping into a car; you recognized his bracelet. You recognized the pattern because you had seen it on the wrist of the man who’d given you orders.

You sat very still. 

Dangerous was not a costume you put on for effect. 

It was an attitude now, a line drawn in the night. 

And for the first time since Dick had turned away, you felt something like clarity.

If you had to choose between letting them bury the truth and standing in the open with your hands scorched, you’d choose the burn. 

You would make them pay for the way they had used you. 

You would make them see what it meant to ruin the person you loved.

Whether that would be enough to earn his forgiveness — or condemn you further — was a moral question you did not want to answer tonight. 

Tonight there were threats to transcribe, leads to leak, and a city to shift underfoot.

You picked up your phone and typed one last message, fingers shaking only slightly.

To: Unknown number.

Message: I didn’t mean to hurt him. But I will not let you touch him. Not anymore.

You hit send, and watched the tiny bubble with the three dots. 

Then you turned off the light and began to plan the next move.

Night became a currency you spent without counting. 

You learned to live in the hours other people called “late,” to measure days by the way streetlights bruised the pavement, by the cadence of voicemail threats and the hush of newsrooms when egos were fed a fresh scandal. 

Sleep came in steals: two hours on a borrowed couch, a nap in the back of a van with your jacket wrapped over your face. 

Time condensed until there was only purpose and the long, echoing absence that purpose was supposed to fill.

You stopped asking how you felt and started asking what would make them tremble. 

It was the only accurate metric left. 

A transfer route pinched? Expose it. 

A front company laundering money for a senator? Publish the ledgers. 

A safehouse behind a florist’s shop? Burn it and leave the flowers. 

Each strike left a clean, almost surgical satisfaction — brief, sharp — and the ache that followed was always shoved somewhere else, like a loose tooth you simply stop thinking about.

You had scavenged names and receipts like someone collecting tinder. 

Operatives, lawyers, accountants — you turned each one into a thread and tugged. 

You didn’t just leak files; you engineered patterns that forced enemies into moves you could predict. 

A raid would follow a published list; an arrest would trigger a cascade of testimony; a frightened man would try to sell what he knew, and in that desperation, you found leverage. 

The more you burned, the more fuel you found.

At first, it was efficient and elegant. 

You wore the plan like armor: a network of contacts across three cities, shell companies you’d seeded with micro-transactions to hide your tracks, a journalist who took your tips and asked no uncomfortable questions. 

You had become a mapmaker of ruin, and the map spread across your screens in cold, logical colors.

But maps are made of choices. 

So were you.

You began to feel changes at the edges. 

There were small things — you paused too long on photographs of him in your phone, thumb rubbing the corner of an image until the pixels blurred; you found yourself rehearsing excuses if someone asked you where you’d been the night of the docks. 

You flinched at sirens in a way that had nothing to do with nerves and everything to do with memory.  

Nightmares slid between your consciousness like hungry animals: Dick’s face, not angry now but hollow, the blue of his eyes dimmer, grief rewriting his jaw.

You never let those dreams last. 

You learned a different discipline: anesthetize, then act. 

Regret was a luxury. 

You’d promised yourself one thing — not to let them touch him — and you kept that promise by turning your life into a blade aimed at their throats. 

If that meant you tasted ash every morning, so be it. 

If that meant you traded conversations with people for silence and plans, you did it without flinching.

People died anyway. 

That was the cruel reality you tried to outrun. 

A courier linked to a fundraising gala vanished after one of your leaks. 

You didn’t order it, you hadn’t meant for that to happen, but his sister’s number burned into your memory like an accusation. 

You tried to rationalize it: collateral, an unfortunate consequence of a necessary war. 

The rationalization frayed quickly in private. 

You’d sit in the dark and let the guilt roar through your chest until it slowed to a rhythm you could bear.

Your language hardened. 

Where you used to think in nuance, you started thinking in verbs: dismantle, expose, bankrupt, scapegoat. 

Where you had once weighed conscience, you weighed effectiveness. 

The starker the choice, the more your body found a perverse pleasure in choosing it. 

It was clearer, at least: every exposed ledger reduced the enemy’s ability to retaliate. 

Every public naming forced men who hid under power into daylight. 

You thought in headlines and outcomes, a surgeon determined to excise a tumor even if the blood didn’t stop.

You also grew more careful. 

Paranoia sharpened into craft. 

Your drop points moved nightly. 

Your burner phones were always one step behind your pursuers. 

You learned to make patterns that looked like mistakes and mistakes that looked like strategy. 

The city itself began to feel like a chessboard and you, more terrifyingly, the only player who remembered all the moves in advance.

And yet—between operations—you found yourself making small, impossible compromises. 

You composed messages you would never send. 

I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to. If I could undo it I would. 

These drafts lived in your outbox like ghosts: unsent apologies that you read until your eyes ached and then deleted. 

Loving him had once been the soft thing you kept for yourself; it had become the raw metric by which you punished yourself.

One night, after a successful leak had toppled a mid-level fixer and triggered another layer of investigation, you sat on a rooftop and watched the city lights like dying stars. 

Your hands trembled, not from the cold, but from adrenaline and hunger and an exhaustion that felt spiritual. 

You let your forehead rest against the rough concrete and felt, for the first time in weeks, something like the shape of the person you had been.

Dick’s voice came to you uninvited — not in memory but in rumor: he was asking questions about the leaks, too. Names he said would be safe if the truth came out; nights he’d gone walking to think; a detective’s stubbornness that didn’t give itself the luxury of letting a wound fester. 

The idea that he might be closing the circle sent a thrill through you that was almost masochistic. 

You wanted him close so you could protect him. 

You wanted him far because you couldn’t bear his pity. 

You wanted both and punished yourself for wanting either.

You had to make a choice: slow the burns and try to piece a life back together, confess and hope for mercy, or keep fueling the inferno until the organization was ash and no one could claim they hadn’t been burned by their own fire. 

The answer echoed through you with the same steady, terrible confidence that had driven you from the start. 

Burn it down. 

All of it.

You rose, because the night had no patience for indecision, and went back to work. 

There was a server farm two boroughs over with weak physical security and a vault of safe deposit boxes you’d marked for exposure.  

You smiled then — a small, sharp thing — and thought of the headlines that would come when the papers printed ledger after ledger, name after name. 

You thought of the look on Marlowe’s face when he realized the scaffolding of his life was termites; thought of the tremor that would run through the men who thought themselves untouchable.

If you were blind to your own ache, it was because you had trained your eyes to find the flint. 

If you were dangerous, it was because danger had become home. 

And if destroying them didn’t fix the sound of his boots walking away, you would at least make sure no one else could walk away unscathed.

Tonight you would not sleep. 

Tonight you would make them burn.

· · ────── ·𖥸· ────── · ·

He finds you in a room that smells like burned coffee and iron — a gutted campaign office lit by a dozen monitors, your face a ghostly constellation. 

Papers are stacked in neat, cruel piles: ledgers, lists, receipts, printed emails with names circled in red. 

Somewhere outside, a news van blares the same headline on loop. 

Inside, the light is wrong and everything looks like a crime scene.

You are at the center of it, small and terrible in the chaos. 

You’re a silhouette hunched over a laptop, fingers moving too fast, eyes rimmed with a raw, animal glare. 

Your hair is loose, sticking to your temple with sweat; your knuckles are grey with ash. 

There’s a cut across one eyebrow you don’t remember getting. 

You look like someone who’s been up for days and decided sleep was a weakness.

He should have felt rage first. 

He should have come in shouting, cuffing you, reading you your rights like an affidavit. 

He should have—something legal, something simple. 

Instead the first thing he feels is a physical, dumb ache, like the sudden awareness of how much trouble you’ve put yourself in. 

Then the rest slides in: the betrayal, the lies, the nights you spent together that now read like evidence.

“Hey.” His voice is softer than he planned. It doesn’t carry the authority he’s worn for years; it carries worry. 

You don’t look up. 

Your shoulders move in a small, exhausted laugh.

“You should leave.” The words are flat, an order dressed as a warning. 

Your fingers don’t stop. 

You pull another file, cross-reference something, tap a sequence into the laptop. 

The glow reflects in your pupils and for a second he sees how hollow you are — the way your face eats light now, the way you’re all edges.

“What you’re doing—” He moves closer, the boards of the floor creaking under him. “You’re making this worse.”

You snort. “Worse for whom?” you say, without looking at him. “For them? Or for you?”

“Stop playing games.” He’s trying for anger now and snatches at it, but it comes out thin. 

He remembers the moment in the warehouse, the way you’d said you’d thought you were doing the right thing, remembers being gutted and walking away. 

He should be colder. 

He isn’t.

You finally look at him. 

It’s like being struck by a wind that smells faintly of smoke and something rotten — guilt, perhaps, or the sharp tang of someone who refuses to let themselves feel. 

Your eyes find his and there’s a flash of something like recognition, then something worse: calculation. 

You are a soldier in a crusade you never step back from.

“Did you think I wouldn’t find you?” he asks. He’s not sure if he’s accusing you or himself. “You left a trail.”

“You expected anything else from me?” You laugh, and the laugh is ragged, too loud in the small room. “You expected me to be neat about this? To poison it with apologies and neat endings?” You slide a thumb over a name, the movement intimate and methodical. “I’m doing what needs to be done.”

“What needs to be done isn’t destroying every person who ever helped them.” His hand lifts, hesitates. “You’re burning whole people down. You’re watching them fall like blocks and you don’t care what hits the floor.”

For a moment — a sliver of a ridiculous, honest moment — you smile. “They deserved to fall,” you say simply. “They made the rules in a room that looked like a church, Dick. Someone had to knock it down.”

He recognizes the rhetoric. 

He also recognizes the way you say it — not like a person who is efficient, but like someone who’s addicted to the collapse. 

You’re exhilarated by the damage. 

There’s a childlike satisfaction in the way your fingers rub ash from a page, in the quickness of your movements, the near-smile when a name is crossed out. 

You are playing Jenga with lives and pretending gravity is justice.

He takes another step. “This was never justice. This is punishment. You’re punishing everyone because you can’t live with what you did.”

His words are a blade; you flinch but you don’t stop. 

For the first time since the warehouse, something cracks in you: a hitch in your breath, a stray complaint at the back of your throat. 

The movements slow; the fingers that have been dancing across the laptop fall still for a beat too long.

“You don’t get to play martyr,” he says, softer now. “You don’t get to dress this up as righteousness and expect it not to hurt people you wouldn’t even name.”

You stare at him like he’s a stranger. “I don’t want to hurt him,” you whisper. The admission is so small he almost misses it. “I don’t want to hurt anyone that I can help not be hurt.”

Dick’s chest tightens. 

He hears the quiet admission like a thing dropped down the stairs — the sound ricocheting, impossible to ignore. 

He should press the advantage, should demand confessions, explanations, handcuffs. 

He should do his job. 

He starts to reach for his phone, for a recorder, for the protocols he knows like the lines on his palm.

Instead his hands drop to his sides. 

He crosses the room with long, silent steps until he’s close enough to see the scabbed cut at your eyebrow, the way your lower lip trembles. 

Up close, you smell of smoke and something else — coffee long gone cold, the faint metallic tang of adrenaline. 

There is exhaustion in you that feels like a ragged wound.

“Look at me,” he says. 

Not an order. 

A plea.

You comply slowly. 

Maybe you want the witness.

Maybe you want someone to see the person you are now, the person you’re terrified you’ve become. 

Your eyes flick over his face, tracking, judging, then find the softness at the edges, the fatigue behind his teeth. 

There’s a look there he recognizes as pity and he hates himself for it.

“Do you remember the first time you told me you loved me?” he asks, voice a hairline. 

The question is ridiculous, and tender. 

It is a thing you both know and the room holds it like a secret.

There’s a beat where your expression folds, like a map creasing. 

Something gullible and fragile emerges; your fingers uncurl as if you might reach for him, but instead you close your hand into a fist and bury it in your hair.

“I remember,” you breathe. “I mean, stars, I remember. I remember thinking I could do both. I remember thinking I could be the thing that made the scales balance.”

“And now?” he asks. 

He’s close enough to see the way you flinch at the memory of his voice, like an old tremor. 

He has to force past the fury that has lived in him since the reveal, force it into a narrow channel so something else can through: concern, grief, a ridiculous stubborn love that never went away.

“Now I don’t know who I am if I can’t hurt them,” you say. 

It’s not a boast. 

It’s not pride. 

It’s confession. 

“They taught me to hold my hands steady while I hurt people for the greater good. Then they gave me someone to love, and I split myself into both and expected it to hold.”

The edges of his vision go soft. 

He thinks of all the small mercies he’d hoped would anchor you—laughing at something stupid in the middle of a raid, the soft invitation of a midnight hand. 

He thinks of how easily those mercies were used as camouflage. 

He thinks of the way you used love like a weapon and then let it become your weakness.

“You’re not this,” he says. The statement is almost a prayer. “You are not just wreckage.”

You laugh, and it’s a breaking sound. “Says the man who feels wrecked,” you snap, but there’s no heat behind it. “You left me.”

“I left because I could not stomach the lie in front of me,” he says. “I left because I couldn’t breathe with it. I left because I thought walking away would be cleaner than letting you keep walking the line.”

“And now you want to patch me up,” you say, bitter amusement curling your lips. “Now you want to be the hero who rescues me from the monster I made.”

He doesn’t move to object. 

Instead he does something small and dangerous: he reaches out and touches your cheek. 

The skin is hot, gritty with ash. 

You don’t pull away at once. 

You let your face lean into his hand for the space of a breath, then harden.

“You don’t get to be the only one who gets to walk away,” he says quietly. “This—this crusade—does not have to be the only thing you are.”

You gape at him like the word ‘crusade’ doesn’t belong in your mouth, like he’s speaking a foreign language. 

Then, suddenly, you deflate, as if someone has burst a bubble that’s been keeping you aloft. 

Your shoulders slump and the air leaves you with a noise like a used match being struck.

“I don’t know how to stop,” you confess, raw. “I can’t. I don’t have the mechanics anymore. I’m so deep I can’t see the surface.”

Dick studies you: the frayed patience, the reckless focus, the hollow where remorse should be. 

He knows you are dangerous—he always knew that—but in this moment, seeing you unmade, he recognizes something else: how tired you are of the violence you were trained for, and how much of you has been erased by it.

He could call reinforcements. 

He could put cuffs on your wrists and drag you into the light and into prosecution. 

He could recite every reason why that would be right. 

His training lines up like dominoes and waits for him to push.

Instead he folds, carefully, like he’s trying not to break glass. 

He steps closer and wraps his arms around you, tentative at first, then with the quiet force of someone who has been left too many times and refuses to leave this one. 

You go rigid at the contact, a wild animal surprised by a hand, but then something fractures in you — not the hardened, ambitious part that wants them to burn, but the small private self who still remembers midnight laughter and easy kisses. 

Tears come then, hot and awful and useless, and you let them fall.

“You don’t get to fix me with pity,” you say into his shoulder, voice muffled.

“I’m not trying to fix you,” he says. “I’m trying to be here. That’s all I can do right now.”

You cling to him like wrongness feels like a last lifeline. 

The monitors continue their pale watch, the papers still smear like fresh evidence. 

Outside, the city simmers with reaction and consequence. 

In this tiny, ruined room, you are both very close and farther than you have ever been.

He holds you without making promises he can’t keep. 

You press your hands flat against his chest and feel his heartbeat — steady, stubborn, human. 

For the first time in a long time, the frenzy inside you slows, if only by degrees.

You are still dangerous. 

You will be for a long time. 

You are still capable of burning everything down. 

But in the press of his hands, you taste something else: the possibility of different work, of different sins to atone for, or at least a new kind of reckoning. 

Whether you’ll take it is another thing entirely.

For now, the small truce is enough. 

He does not forgive you; he doesn’t have to. 

He only holds you while you break, and that, you think with a panicked, grateful flutter, might be the scariest, most necessary thing you’ve done in months.