Insane In My Membrane

Debbie’s always known. Always known that Mark had loved you longer than he’d even known it. Debbie knows that every first of Mark’s start and continue with you. The first time mark gives you flowers is sometime in pre-school. His sneakers are caked with dirt and as he walks towards the tree you’re sitting at he stumbles over his own feet. He stretches his hand out shyly and asks to be friends. It’s the kind of thing Nolan told him girls like. Safe to say Nolan was right. When Debbie picks him up from school, she sees Mark’s made a friend. The kind of friend who makes matching flower bracelets. 

me @ 10

The third time it happened, you were genuinely starting to take it personally.

Not the kidnapping, exactly. You'd made a kind of grim peace with the kidnapping. What you couldn't make peace with was the look on the goon's face when you explained — calmly, reasonably, with your hands zip-tied behind your back — that the whole operation was fundamentally flawed.

"I'm telling you," you said, from your position duct-taped to a chair in what appeared to be a condemned warehouse in Crime Alley, "this is not going to work."

The man guarding you — big, bored-looking, a tattoo of a serpent crawling up his neck — squinted at you. "Shut up."

"I'm serious. He's not going to come for me. We broke up."

Serpent-tattoo looked at the other guy across the room, a wiry nervous one who kept checking his phone. They shared the particular look of men who had not been briefed on this possibility.

"We got good intel," the wiry one said, defensive. "You're his girl."

"Was. Past tense. Three months ago." You flexed your wrists experimentally. The zip tie was cheap, at least. "Look it up, if you have some kind of database for this sort of thing."

"Red Hood will come," Serpent-tattoo said, with the conviction of a man repeating something he'd been told in a briefing.

You sighed at the ceiling.

The first time, you'd almost found it sweet, in a horrifying way.

You and Jason had been broken up for three weeks. The wounds were fresh, the kind that made you stare at your phone at 1 a.m. wondering if you should text him. (You hadn't. You were proud of this.) You'd been at a corner store buying ice cream — the emotional support kind — when four men in masks had bundled you into a van.

When the Red Hood had crashed through the skylight forty minutes later, guns blazing, body moving through the space like violence given shape, you'd had one complicated second of oh before the familiar exhilaration and terror of watching him work collapsed into something much messier.

He'd gotten you out. He'd cut the zip ties. He'd made sure you weren't hurt, hands checking your face, your wrists, all business except for the way his jaw was set like he was holding something back with his back teeth.

"I'm fine," you'd said.

"I know."

"You didn't have to come." You said quietly, your voice cracking slightly with emotion.

The helmet had turned toward you, unreadable red lenses where his eyes would be. "Yeah," he'd said. "I did."

And then he'd been gone, and you'd stood in the dark street with your pint of melting ice cream and felt about seventeen things at once.

The second time had been more embarrassing for everyone involved.

A different crew, apparently uninformed of the update in your relationship status, had grabbed you outside your apartment building. You'd had more warning that time, enough to get a solid elbow into someone's ribs before the numbers overwhelmed you, but the outcome was the same. Warehouse. Chair. Zip ties. The waiting.

Jason had been angrier that time.

Not at you — he never did that, never once made you feel like your existence was an inconvenience even when it clearly was — but the carefully controlled fury radiating off him as he'd worked the knot at your wrists had been palpable even through the armor.

"You need to move," he'd said firmly, his tone controlled.

"Excuse me?"

"Apartment. Different neighborhood."

"Jason." You'd turned to face him, which put you extremely close together in the dark, close enough to see the tension in his throat above the collar of his jacket. "We broke up. You don't get to tell me where to live."

He'd looked at you for a long moment. Something had moved through his expression that you hadn't been able to name, or hadn't wanted to.

"No," he'd said. "I don't."

And then he'd handed you your bag, which he'd apparently retrieved from the scene, and walked away without another word, and you'd gone home and sat on your floor for a long time.

"Okay," Serpent-tattoo said now, checking his watch. "He should've gotten the message by now."

"What message?"

"Told him we had you. Sent proof."

You blinked. "What proof? You just grabbed me twenty minutes ago."

The wiry one held up a phone, showing a photo of you in the chair. You looked annoyed in it, which was accurate.

"He'll come," Serpent-tattoo said again. He seemed to need to believe this.

You were about to explain, again, the fundamental error in this logic, when the high window on the far wall exploded inward.

He moved the way he always moved — like the room owed him something and he was here to collect. Two of them were down before you'd fully processed the entry. The third caught a kick to the sternum that sent him crashing into shelving units. Serpent-tattoo, to his credit, put up a decent fight. It lasted approximately eight seconds.

Then there was just Jason, standing in the wreckage, helmet sweeping the room, and you in your chair with your hands behind your back.

He crossed to you in four strides and crouched behind you, and you felt the zip tie give way with one sharp pull.

"Hi," you said, a tired smile on your face.

"Hi." His voice through the modulator was even.

You stood, rolling your wrists, and turned to face him. He was still crouched, which put him slightly below eye level for once, and something about that felt significant in a way you didn't want to examine. Get your mind out of the gutter girl.

"Third time," you mused.

"Yeah." He said, not quite meeting your eyes.

"I told them we broke up."

"I heard you telling them. Through the door." There was something in his voice that wasn't quite amusement but lived in the same neighborhood. "You were very thorough."

"I was trying to save everyone some trouble."

He stood then, slow, and you were back to having to look up at him, at the inscrutable helmet. Neither of you moved.

"You know," you said, because apparently your mouth had decided to handle this without consulting the rest of you, "this is getting ridiculous."

"Which part." He quipped.

"All of it. The kidnapping. You showing up." A pause. "The part where you always do show up."

The helmet tilted, just slightly. The gesture was so Jason — that particular angle of his head when he was thinking something he didn't want to say — that it hit you somewhere behind the sternum.

"What do you want me to do," he said. "Not come?"

"That's not—" You stopped. Started over. "That's not what I'm saying."

"Then what are you saying?"

The warehouse was very quiet. Outside, somewhere, sirens were starting to wail toward you, still distant. You had maybe four minutes before this got complicated in a different way.

"I'm saying," you tried, "that you keep coming. And I keep—" You gestured, uselessly, at the space between you. "And you've done it three times now. You didn't have to. We're not—"

"I know what we are." He interrupted you.

The flatness of it stopped you.

"Do you," you said, eyebrow raised.

A long pause. Jason reached up and pulled the helmet off, which he almost never did in the field, and you were suddenly looking at his face — tired, jaw shadowed with stubble, eyes that had always given him away whether he wanted them to or not.

He looked awful, honestly. Not injured-awful. The other kind.

"I'm miserable," he said. Like he was confessing something that had been extracted from him through considerable effort. "If that's what you're asking."

Your throat did something inconvenient.

"I wasn't asking," you said. "I'm just — I've been—" You stopped again. Pressed on. "I'm miserable too. For the record."

Something shifted in his face.

"Why did we break up," he said tiredly.

"You know why."

"I know what we said. I'm asking if it was real."

You thought about the last three months. About staring at your phone. About ice cream and warehouses and the way he always, always came, and the way you'd always, impossibly, known he would.

"I don't know anymore," you said honestly. "I think we were both scared and we called it something else."

The sirens were getting closer. Neither of you moved.

"I want to try again," he said. It came out careful and certain in equal measure, the way Jason said things when he'd made a decision and was done second-guessing it. "I know that's — I know it's complicated. I know what being with me costs."

"I know what it costs," you said. "I've known for a while."

"And?"

You looked at him — at his face in the low light, at the careful way he was holding himself still, waiting — and felt the last three months dissolve into something much simpler.

"And I'd like to stop getting kidnapped by people who are better informed about our relationship status than I am," you quipped back.

The corner of his mouth moved.

"Yeah," he said. "Me too."

He crossed the last bit of distance between you, and when he kissed you it was like something settling back into place — not frantic, not desperate, just right in a way that you'd been refusing to think about for ninety-three days.

You were both smiling when you broke apart.

"We should go," he said.

"Probably," you agreed.

He tucked you under his arm as he steered you toward the exit, helmet under his other arm, the easy familiar weight of him against your side.

"You should still think about moving," he said, conversationally.

“Jason”

"Different neighborhood. Better sight lines—"

"I will zip-tie myself to that chair—"

His laugh, rare and real, echoed off the warehouse walls, and you walked out into the Crime Alley night together, and behind you Serpent-tattoo was starting to regain consciousness, and the sirens were close, and none of it touched you at all.

Later, when a fourth crew grabbed you outside your — admittedly same — apartment building, they would report back to their employer that the target had laughed for almost a full minute before saying, with great satisfaction, "oh, he is going to think this is so funny."

They did not find this encouraging.

If there was one thing Jason never expected, it was that someday, in his miserable life, he would find someone who loved him—not some random hookup, not someone he spent a night with and forgot the face of by morning.

Someone who stayed. Who didn’t give up on him, even though he himself had given up a long time ago.

Meeting you gave Jason a double-edged sword; on one hand, he was no longer living a routine that slowly killed him for the second time. But now, with a relationship, he couldn’t help becoming five times more paranoid, more doubtful.

Obviously, he had no doubts that you loved him—the problem was that he couldn’t stop doubting whether he deserved the love you offered him. And occasionally, that led him to think about the possible future day when you would realize it too, that maybe he didn’t deserve you, and you would leave.

That night, after a half-assed patrol and an accidental run-in with Bruce, he was on edge. Jason dropped himself onto the couch, helmet hitting the floor beside his boots.

He stared at the ceiling, refusing to look at his own reflection in the turned-off television. He didn’t want to drown any deeper into his own pit. Didn’t want to see the newest cut on his cheek, the one that would probably turn into yet another scar.

He didn’t even hear you at first when you walked out of the bedroom, rubbing your eyes.

That was how deep in his own head he was—sinking, spiraling, chewing on the same rotten thoughts that always crawled back after nights like this. Nights where Bruce’s disappointed stare lingered longer than any bruise, where another name got added to a list Jason never wrote down but never forgot either, where he had a reminder he wasn't a good person.

“Jay?” He swallowed thickly, looking up at you. “…Rough night?” you asked.

He huffed out something that wasn’t quite a laugh. “Yeah,” he muttered. “Something like that.”

Silence followed.

Jason expected you to turn around, head back to the bedroom, and sleep peacefully after seeing that all his limbs were still attached. Instead, he felt the couch dip beside him as you sat down, your thigh pressing lightly against his. He took a slow breath.

A Mark Grayson x Reader Series

Chapter one: Collision Course

••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••

The coffee was already cold.

You stared down at the cup sitting on the edge of the campus fountain, the one you'd set there twenty minutes ago when you got distracted watching a sparrow that had landed too close to a dying patch of grass near the stone base. You'd watched it tilt its head, hop twice, and then go very, very still.

And then it hadn't been still anymore. It had fluttered off like nothing happened.

You blinked. Picked up your cold coffee. Told yourself you hadn't seen what you thought you saw.

But honestly…. It wasn't the first time.

Reyton University's main quad was buzzing with the kind of mid-September energy that only existed in that narrow window before midterms crushed everyone's spirit. Students threw frisbees. A girl was asleep across two benches with a textbook on her face. Someone's dog had apparently escaped from the biology building because there was a very confused golden retriever trotting past the library with a student running after it, out of breath, backpack bouncing.

You had a comparative literature paper due Thursday and you hadn't started it.

You were thinking about dead sparrows instead.

He came out of nowhere, which, in fairness, was something you'd later learn was more literal than it sounded.

One second the path in front of you was clear. The next, someone collided with you hard enough to send your cold coffee launching out of your hand in a beautiful, tragic arc before it hit the brick walkway and exploded. You stumbled back a step. He stumbled back two, caught himself, and then looked at you with an expression that was equally horrified and apologetic in a way that somehow made both emotions worse.

"Oh— god, I'm so sorry—"

He was already reaching toward the fallen cup, which was impressive since it was now mostly just a cardboard sleeve and a puddle. He grabbed it anyway, like maybe returning the empty vessel was still a gesture that counted.

"I wasn't—" He stopped. Seemed to recalibrate. "I wasn't paying attention. That was completely my fault."

You looked down sadly at the coffee puddle. You then shifted your gaze up to him.

He was taller than average, dark-haired, with the kind of jaw that made it hard to be properly annoyed at someone. There was something in his eyes, though, that caught you off guard. Not the color — dark brown, warm — but the look in them. Like he was perpetually carrying something just slightly heavier than everyone else around him, even when he was smiling his apology at you.

You'd seen that look before. On people in hospitals. On people standing outside of them.

You shook the thought off.

"It was already cold," you said.

He blinked, head tilting, “What?"

"The coffee. I wasn't actually drinking it. I'd kind of forgotten about it." You watched his expression shift through confusion to something softer, more uncertain. "So you technically did me a favor. Gave me an excuse to get a fresh one."

Something in the tension around his shoulders eased, just slightly. "I can— I could replace it. It's the least I can do for running you over."

"You didn't run me over."

"I basically did."

"I'm still standing."

"Barely," he said teasingly, and then seemed surprised at himself for saying it. Like a small, reflexive sense of humor had escaped before he could decide if this was a situation that allowed for one.

You smiled. You couldn't help it.

"Mark," he said, and stuck his hand out with the kind of faint awkwardness of someone who wasn't sure if a handshake was weird in the situation but defaulted to it anyway because he'd been raised to. "Mark Grayson."

"I know," you said, and then immediately wished you could reach back in time and close your own mouth. He looked startled. You shook his hand anyway, because there was no recovering from it gracefully. "I mean — we have Intro to Sociology together. Professor Ambers' section, Tuesday-Thursday. You sit two rows ahead of me."

Something flickered across his face. "I didn't— I don't think I've—"

"You usually come in late," you offered. "And you look like you want to be anywhere else."

"That's not—" He paused. "Okay, that's fair. I'm sorry, I'm not usually—" Another pause. He seemed to be having a genuinely difficult time being a normal person and you found it oddly charming. "I don't think I caught your name."

You told him.

He repeated it, just once, like he was making sure he had it right. There was something careful about the way he did it. Deliberate. Like your name was something worth getting correct.

"I'll buy you a coffee," he said. "A hot one this time. As an apology. And also because I feel like I owe you for not knowing your name when apparently we've been in class together for three weeks."

"You don't owe me anything for that."

"Then accept it as a social nicety," he said, "because I was raised to do something when I literally knock things out of people's hands."

You looked at him for a moment. The sun was sitting at that angle it got in early fall — low and gold, cutting long shadows across the quad bricks. Somewhere behind you, the biology student had apparently caught the loose dog and was crying with relief. Somewhere above, a pair of crows were making noise in the oak tree by the fountain.

The patch of grass near the fountain base was green again.

You hadn't noticed it come back.

"Okay," you agreed, a soft smile on your face.

The campus café was called The Burrow, which you'd always thought was a bit on the nose for a college setting, and it smelled like espresso and old paperbacks and stressed undergraduates. It was your favorite place on campus and had been since orientation week, when you'd walked in on a whim and felt, against all reason, like something in the room recognized you.

Mark held the door. You thanked him as you walked through, feeling his warmth behind you as he followed you in.

You got in line. He stood beside you, hands in the pocket of his jacket — an ordinary blue jacket, a little worn at the cuffs. Nothing about him looked remarkable if you didn't look long enough.

"What's your major?" he asked, the way you do when you're filling conversational space but also genuinely want to know.

"Comparative literature, with a double in religious studies," you said, watching him process that. "Before you ask — no, I don't know what I'm going to do with it. Yes, it was entirely my own choice. Yes, my parents had thoughts.”

"I wasn't going to ask," he said, and sounded honest. "I was going to say that sounds interesting. The religious studies part especially." A beat. "There's something kind of — I don't know. Useful, maybe, about studying what people believe. What they're afraid of. What they'll do to explain things they can't explain."

You looked at him sideways. That was not the response you'd expected.

"What's yours?" you asked.

"Undeclared." He said it with the easy flatness of someone who'd given that answer enough times to stop apologizing for it. "I'm working on it."

"What do you think it'll end up being?"

He was quiet for a second. The line moved.

"Honestly?" He exhaled through his nose. "Sometimes I'm not sure the standard list of options covers what I'm actually going to end up doing."

You didn't know what to say to that. It was a strange thing to say. It was the kind of thing people said when they were hiding something behind it, or when they were so tired of hiding something that some of it was leaking out through innocuous sentences to strangers in coffee shop lines.

You ordered a lavender oat milk latte. He ordered a black coffee, which tracked.

You found a table near the window. The afternoon light was honey-thick now, coming in at a slant. Outside, a leaf detached from a branch and fell in a long, lazy spiral.

You watched it hit the ground.

For just a moment — just half a second, the kind of thing you could convince yourself was a trick of the light — you thought you saw the leaf twitch. Curl. Like it was trying, against all logic and reason, to unfold back into something living.

Your hand tightened around your cup.

"You okay?" Mark asked.

You looked up. He was watching you with those too-perceptive eyes, the ones that carried that familiar weight you couldn't quite name.

"Fine," you said. "I just—" You stopped. Smiled. "Do you ever feel like you're waiting for something? And you don't know what it is, but you can feel it. Like something's about to change and you're standing right at the edge of it."

He was quiet for a long moment.

"Yeah," he said, and the word came out low and certain, like he'd been holding it for a while. "Actually, I know exactly what you mean."

Outside, a crow landed on the windowsill and stared in.

You didn't look at it.

But it watched you.

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I love u Markus Sebastian Grayson

Jason:

Tim: tall statues.

Jason: I heard you. But why.

Tim staring at the Ushiku Daibutsu statue far off in the distance:

Tim: it’s gunna move

Jason: it not gunna move.

Tim: it’s gunna move. I’m gunna wake up and it’ll be in a different spot.

Jason: no it won’t.

Tim: it’ll be bent over looking in my fucking room.

Jason, now imagining it and getting unnerved: it won’t.

Tim: it’s looking at me!

Jason: STOP IT! It’s not!

Tim, turning to run away: get me out of here! I can’t take it! It’s gunna get me!

Jason, shoving against Tim to get away first: stop! Don’t leave me here!

Bruce and Clark standing next to them:

Clark: don’t judge me

Clark: but I have an idea.

Includes: Dick Grayson, Jason Todd, Wally West, Hal Jordan & Barry Allen

Summary: no thoughts just somno with the boys

Content/ CW -> smut/nsfw, fem! reader (has a pussy + fem pronouns), consensual somno, oral, fingering, unprotected sex, mentions of arguing (Dick's), nightmares (Hal), mostly slow and soft

froggi yaps -> this is 1/3 fics of this i did, ive been in such a somno mood lately idkidk <3 i hope you guys enjoy

Somehow, you made it out practically unscathed but by the grotesque way your car is bent and wrangled, no one would have guessed at first sight. The fear paralyzes him when he arrives, he knows he’s moving but he feels stagnant. The seconds it takes him to reach you feels like a millennia, he can’t get there fast enough. And the uncertainty of your condition is unlike any fear he’s ever known- he thinks he’ll just about die a second time.

But the relief that washes over him from seeing you alive shakes him so violently, his body reacts before he fully digests the sight. The sight of you wrapped delicately in the back of an ambulance, his girl. Safe, unharmed.

His body fights to crawl to you, to smother you in his worries until you’re sick of him. But the sobs that pierce through him are so unforgiving, he can’t move. You hear him before you see him. You’ve heard his cries before. Nights spent locked behind closed doors- the soft sound of choked sobs bleeding from just under. That sick habit of hiding himself away, not wanting to be seen. Or the quiet sniffles towards the end of a movie with no happy ending. Quick to wipe his tears before the lights come up. But this is different. He doesn’t have it within himself to hide away. His biggest fear almost came true tonight- the grief of almost losing you ruins him completely. Jason knows he should pull himself together. He knows he needs to be strong for you but tonight, he’s inconsolable.

Just short of a few feet away, grasping at anything around him, stands your sweet boy. Clutching his chest, trying to ground himself. Jay doesn’t know what to do in this moment. He’s more shaken up than you are. But the relief of being given a second chance is what gets him.

From the day Jason was left for dead, he decided miracles weren’t for him. Rarely had he been shown grace, and what kindness was extended to him was just as quickly ripped away. He’d become compliant to the seclusion that found its way into his life. Isolated behind closed doors and shadows, thinking he’s doing everyone a favor. But the ease at which you made your way into his life had thrown him off course. Patient and kind, honeyed words melting him to mush- he stood no chance against you. Before he knew it, he found home within his very own miracle.