Sofiaˎˊ.⋆♱🪽✧ 8teen; Bullseye’s wife; Britney stan

WARNING | angst-slow burn; PAIRING | nikto x fem! reader; SUMMARY | Nikto’s past crawls back to torture him a second time

You and Nikto had never been anything more than two individuals assigned to the same work.

There had been no understanding between you—at least none that could be named. No glances held a second too long. No words exchanged that were not strictly necessary. No gestures that might betray something softer, something dangerously human.

Nothing.

And perhaps it was precisely that nothing which made everything else incomprehensible.

You had stepped aside.

The corridors carried the explanation with casual indifference: you were now with TF141. A transfer. An opportunity. A logical progression. Just someone who had let go for a different path. Such things happened all the time. No one lingered on them.

And yet Nikto did.

Not outwardly. Not in any way that could be disciplined or recorded. His reports remained immaculate. His execution precise. No error. No defiance. No visible fracture. The change was subtle. Gradual. Hidden beneath his usual silence.

It surfaced during a minor operation, one so inconsequential it did not merit a codename. The kind of task men forget before the debriefing ends.

Nikto arrived late to his assigned position. Just a few seconds. Nothing official. Nothing to mark in a report. But enough to make Horangi’s eyes lift.

They were advancing when the ventilation system altered its frequency. A low, persistent hum, nothing to warrant a pause.

Nikto slowed.

Horangi saw it—the near-imperceptible tightening of his shoulders, the fractional step backward, the slight lowering of his head. His breathing slowed. Counting.

One. Two.

The air in the ducts above them seemed to thicken, to descend. The corridor narrowed—not physically, but in some internal measure only he could perceive.

He was no longer there. His mind sank into darkness. Metal mere inches from his face. The constant breath of forced air filling the confined space, stripping it of silence, stripping it of thought.

That sound had meant only one thing.

Wait.

Count your breathing.

Do not move until she looks at you.

A month.

A month of this. Thirty days in which the world had shrunk to the width of a single breath, yet stretched long enough to contain you. Your breathing, your eyes, the discipline of your stillness, the faintest twitch of your fingers—all mapped into his muscle memory. Survival measured not in ammunition or strategy, but in the precision of shared restraint. On the invisible dialogue between you two.

There had been no confession. No acknowledgment. And yet, something had formed there—something neither operational nor entirely rational. A dependence not on touch, but on presence.

“Nikto?”

The voice reached him from a distance.

He did not answer at once. Not out of defiance. His body was listening—for a shift in the air, for a breath that no longer existed.

His gaze moved left.

Empty corridor.

But in the conduit, you were always there. At the exact distance required. Never too near. Never too far.

Horangi followed his line of sight and frowned. “There’s nobody there.”

Of course there wasn’t.

Nikto moved immediately, as if waking from something he refused to name. He corrected his position, adjusted his pace. Perfect again. Measured. Controlled.

But the truth remained—unspoken, intolerable: his body still obeyed a rhythm you had taught it.

Not consciously. Not sentimentally. But somewhere beneath discipline and ideology, beneath training and trauma, there lingered the memory of survival synchronized to your gaze.

Each step, each controlled breath, was calibrated to the echo of you in his mind. Every pause, every minute hesitation, was a conversation no one else could witness. He followed your memory.

And that—more than the delay, more than the silence—was what unsettled him.

Because nothing had ever existed between you.

Nothing.

And yet the absence had left a shape.

The metal held you compressed in an unnatural posture — knees bent, spine curved, muscles forced into a shape the body was never meant to sustain. Your breath rebounded softly against the walls. Each exhale returned to you altered, carrying proof that the other was still there. Still alive. Still breathing

The red emergency light filtered through the grates in intermittent pulses, slicing the darkness into narrow bands. For a fraction of a second you would see his eyes. Then they would vanish again, swallowed whole. You were beside him.

The conduit was too narrow to allow the illusion of distance. Even silence had weight here; it pressed against you the same way the metal did.

At first, you barely looked at each other. You kept your gaze forward, toward the black mouth that led to the next grate. He kept his eyes lowered, studying invisible details in the metal, as though the surface might offer him refuge from something unnamed.

There were few words between you. There was no need.

Coordinates.

Watch rotations.

Ration counts

Low voices. Neutral tones. You spoke little. He spoke less. Orders passed in short, functional whispers.The rest was silence.

The red light fractured his face into fleeting impressions: the angle of a cheekbone, the severe line of his jaw, shadows hinting at scars without revealing them entirely. He would free his face from the mask only when he was certain you could not see — just long enough to draw a fuller breath.

In those moments, you did not look at him. You listened. There was a difference and he knew it.

One night — or what your bodies agreed to call night — the cold grew more insistent. The metal beneath you held dampness. You sat with your back against the side of the duct, knees drawn to your chest, arms wrapped around yourself to guard what little warmth remained

The draft descended along your side, steady and merciless.

Your fingers trembled. Not enough to betray you. Enough for him to notice.

Nikto saw it within seconds. He did not move at once. His gaze fell to your hands, then lifted to your face. You stared ahead stubbornly, as if by refusing to acknowledge the cold you might deny it power.

The duct creaked softly above you. The air slipped down colder.

He knew that current. He had already mapped it in his mind. He knew exactly where it struck. You.

Time passed — unmeasured, stretched thin. Your breathing shortened despite your effort to control it.

His jaw tightened.

The space permitted no innocence. To move was to come closer. And to come closer was to disturb something you had both kept untouched in silence — not out of discipline, but out of a quiet fear of how easily it might cease to be only survival.

Yet to remain still meant watching you endure it alone.

He lingered longer than necessary. Time stretched, elastic, tremulous — each second a weight pressing on the small space between you.

Then he moved.

One knee slid slowly between your folded legs, deliberate, careful — leaving you the slimmest margin to refuse, if such a thing were possible.

You didn’t.

The other knee followed, anchoring beside your hip. His hands pressed lightly against the metal at your shoulders, forming a frame around you without touching.

And then his body lowered. Slowly. As though even gravity might wound you both

He hovered above you, suspended by forearms and knees, leaving the narrowest space between your torsos — enough for breath, not enough for indifference

His back met the draft. The cold struck him, slid beneath his collar, traced his spine. He didn’t flinch.

Your breath fell into his rhythm.

Each micro-adjustment he made was measured, restrained — a fraction closer, a fraction back — as if balance depended on restraint rather than proximity.

It was your hands that troubled him most.

Folded tight against your chest, fingers stiff, pale in the dim, pulsing red. You tried to hide the tremor, a whisper of fear, a secret betrayed by nerves.

He saw it.

The trembling was faint, contained — almost dignified. Yet he felt it, as if the very air carried it straight into him.

He lowered himself slightly, enough to speak without echo.

“Show us.”

The words were low, rough-edged, but not unkind. You hesitated. Then slowly, you released your hands.

He remained still. His hand rose toward his mask — and paused. He was afraid. Not of being seen.

Of being known.

His fingers caught the fabric’s edge. He lifted it only slightly. His lips emerged in the fractured red light. They bore the story of survival. Upper lip broken on one side, missing flesh replaced by unevenly stitched skin. A thick scar cut across the natural line. The lower lip bore an old, stubborn wound.

No symmetry. Only history.

He did not meet your gaze immediately. As if he could endure your cold more easily than your gaze.

He lifted your hands toward his face.

The first breath he exhaled over your fingers was tentative. Warm. Fragile. The scar shifted subtly as he breathed, tugging imperceptibly at the healed skin.

You felt the warmth seep through your knuckles — slow, almost tender. He breathed again. Closer. Your tremor softened. You lifted your eyes. He felt it before he saw it.

With visible effort, he raised his gaze. Only briefly. As if bracing for something unspoken.

He searched your eyes — perhaps for disgust, perhaps for pity. He found neither.

Only quiet, unwavering attention. And that unsettled him more than rejection ever could. His breath faltered. The scar tightened with his inhale.

You were close enough to trace the interruption in softness, to see the tension when he exhaled. The wound had not erased him. It had only rewritten him.

He lowered the mask again with abrupt precision, as if lingering had been a mistake.

But he did not move away.

Your hands remained in his. He held them a moment longer than reason demanded.

“It will pass,” he murmured — almost to himself.

He did not specify whether he meant the cold.

Slowly, he guided your hands back to your chest. He stayed above you, intercepting the draft, sharing breath in the narrow dark.

And in that tiny, constrained space — too close for comfort, too intimate for words — something fragile began to exist between you.

Not declared. Not named.

Not even understood. But present

Like warmth seeping slowly into fingers that had almost forsaken the memory of touch.

The corridor was still heavy with gunpowder when Horangi realized something wasn’t right.

It wasn’t the dissociation. Nikto had always carried that — the brief absences, the way his mind sometimes stepped sideways. Everyone knew about the fractures. The trauma. The voices that lingered behind his silences.

No.

This was something quieter. This was belief.

The order came a second too late. Nothing catastrophic. But he failed to cover an angle that, for months, had been yours. An angle his body no longer questioned.

A reflex shaped by habit. A trust shaped by you.

“Check the flank!” Horangi’s voice cut through the corridor — sharp, loud enough to tear him from the stage that existed only in his head.

Nikto reacted on instinct. Too late to be flawless. Fast enough not to be fatal. The bullet grazed the wall. Plaster burst into the air like pale dusted snow. The threat was neutralized seconds later. Clean. Efficient. No damage done.

But something had shifted.

They advanced toward the next room. Nikto covered the right side. Or he should have.

Instead, his gaze drifted elsewhere — to a corner that required no coverage — lingering there, steady, expectant. As if waiting for someone to step into place.

That was when Horangi caught him by the tactical vest and pulled him back half a step. “What are you doing?” he asked under his breath.

Nikto looked at him. His stare was steady. Empty. As though the question had traveled a long way to reach him.

“Operational,” he replied.

The word landed flat. Devoid of life. Horangi didn’t let go. “No. You weren’t. You left the flank exposed.”

Nikto did not bristle. Did not argue. Did not stiffen. He inhaled slowly.

“The flank was covered.” There was no defensiveness in it. Only certainty.

Horangi studied him. Followed the line of his weapon, the angle of his stance, the direction of his gaze.

There was no one there.

“There was no one,” Horangi said, quieter now. “No one covering it.” The words lingered between them.

Nikto didn’t blink. But his jaw tightened beneath the mask. The missing portion of his upper lip pulled faintly against the scar as he clenched his teeth.

“It was covered,” he repeated. And this time, it wasn’t defense.

It was memory.

Horangi released him slowly. “You’re still working in pairs,” he said at last. Behind them, the team moved forward. Calm comms. Measured steps. The operation unfolding like it always did.

But here, between them, something fragile had surfaced.

“She’s not here.” The words were firm. Not cruel.

A muscle flickered in Nikto’s cheek.

His eyes shifted — not to Horangi. To the exact place you had once occupied.

The distance where you stood without needing instruction. The angle you covered before anyone asked. The silent understanding that had required no confirmation.

Automatically. As if the space still held your outline.

“You need to readjust,” Horangi continued. “Or someone’s going to get hurt.” He didn’t raise his voice. He didn’t have to.

The operation continued. Nikto’s posture was precise. Weapon steady. Movements correct. Everything where it belonged.

And yet the rhythm was wrong.

Like an internal metronome calibrated to a presence that no longer existed. Like a heartbeat trying to synchronize with another that had stopped.

For the rest of the operation, he covered angles that didn’t matter. Left vulnerable the ones that had never needed to be named — because you had always taken them. Without command. Without acknowledgment.

His gaze kept searching for a point that no longer existed. A trained soldier navigating chaos had lost the single coordinate that made the chaos bearable.

Horangi understood then — this wasn’t deterioration. It was persistence. Nikto wasn’t malfunctioning.

He was still moving through a world calibrated to you. Still expecting your breath in the comms. Your shadow in his peripheral vision. Your presence in the blind spot he no longer checked.

And in a corridor wide enough for a full unit, he was still fighting as if the walls were inches from his face. As if survival still depended on the quiet certainty that you were there.

As if, somewhere in him, you still were.

Nikto remembered that day as if it had been engraved into his mind — minute by minute.

The base was too bright when you two returned. After a month in the duct, the artificial light of the corridors felt violent. White. Cruel.

You stopped at the entrance to the dormitory, fingers still dusted with fine powder that refused to disappear. You walked ahead of him, new uniform, shoulders straight. Already reabsorbed into the system.

Nikto wasn’t.

The corridor was wide. Clean. Safe.

Too much space.

A month in that conduit — bodies pressed together to survive the cold, the silence, the distant sounds that promised death. A month of breathing each other in, of feeling the other’s heartbeat as the only proof of life.

Now there were three steps between you two.

Three steps that felt like an abyss. Three steps that had never existed down there.

In the tunnel there had been no room for desire. Only for the warmth required not to die. Only for the other’s pulse as anchor.

Here there was space and space made everything real.

You stopped. Turned slowly.

He wished you didn’t.

Because when you looked at him like that — with the same eyes that in the dark had searched for his— it all came back. The way you would press closer when the cold seemed to hollow you out from the inside. The way your breathing had fallen into his rhythm without either of them speaking.

“It’s over,” you said softly. Not as relief. As fact.

Nikto went still.

The scar pulled where his upper lip was missing as he clenched his jaw. He couldn’t hold your gaze for more than a second. His blue eyes studied yours as if you were a mirage— something that might vanish if stared at too long.

You stepped toward him. “Nikto.”

He stepped back. Barely perceptible. But he did.

The corridor was silent. Too silent. If someone saw you two standing this close, unmoving, it wouldn’t be interpreted as weakness.It would be worse.

He lifted a hand but did not touch you immediately.

His fingers hovered near your cheek , suspended in the air as if asking permission without words. In the duct he had never asked. He had pulled you against him when the tremors grew violent. Covered your mouth when silence was required. Held you still when gunfire above shook dust into your lungs.

Now his hand stopped halfway.

It trembled— barely.

You saw that. And even if your pride tried to brush off his hesitation, the gesture broke you — even if only a little.

“Are you afraid?” You asked.

Yes. But not of you.

Of how deeply his soul was drawn to yours.

“If I touch you here,” he murmured, voice lower than usual, “it won’t be about survival.”

“Then what will it be about?”

The scar tightened when he inhaled. “I’m trying not to make a mistake.”

“Am I a mistake?”

That struck him. Finally, his fingers settled against your neck. Not to restrain. To verify. The way he had in the dark searching for the pulse.

He found it.

Fast.

His thumb lingered a second too long.

“In the duct…” his voice roughened, almost unfamiliar to himself, “it was necessary.”

You tilted your head. “Necessary?”

A slight nod. His gaze still fixed on the point where your pulse beat beneath his thumb. “The heat. The contact. It was… functional.”

The word hung between you two like something wrong.

“And now?”

“Now it isn’t necessary,” he said quietly.

You held your breath.

In the duct, Nikto had never hesitated. He had threaded his fingers through your hair when you trembled. He had gripped your wrist just to feel your pulse beneath his thumb. He had slept with his face pressed to the curve of your neck to make sure you were breathing — or at least, that was the excuse he gave himself.

Now he looked at you as though you were a blind spot. “Down there, it was different,” he said. His voice did not waver. That was the worst part.

“There were no feelings. Not like you think.” His jaw tightened under the mask, the scar pulling pale against his skin. “It was survival. That’s all.”

He forced himself to meet your eyes, as if eye contact could make the lie cleaner.

“The body reacts to cold. To fear. It seeks heat. Contact. A heartbeat close enough to follow.” He swallowed, but the rest came out steady. “That’s what it was. Two bodies refusing to die in the same dark.”

Each word landed with deliberate precision. Measured. Controlled.

“It wasn’t…” He stopped, corrected himself. “It wasn’t real.”

The corridor light exposed everything the conduit had hidden. The space between you felt surgical now, sterile and unforgiving.

“In the conduit,” he continued, quieter but no less firm, “I held you because you were freezing. I touched you because you were shaking. I slept against you because we needed to conserve heat.”

A beat.

“Don’t mistake instinct for sentiment.”

His hand, traitorous, had not moved from your neck. He noticed. Removed it slowly as though detaching from a wound.

“What happened down there belongs to the dark,” he said. “It doesn’t survive up here.”

And yet his pulse had betrayed him the moment he found yours.

PAIRING | hal jordan x fem! reader; bruce wayne x fem! reader; selina kyle x fem! reader. SUMMARY | The only way to save the world was to end Hal Jordan’s. WARNINGS | angst, death, abuse, unwanted touching, needles, my english because it’s not my first language

“The System is not a machine. It is not a construct. It is a living organism—one that learns, grows, devours. It cannot be shut down without collapse, without dragging the reality that holds it down into the abyss,” J’onn said.

Barry’s fists tightened, knuckles whitening. “Then we destroy it.”

“You cannot,” the Martian replied, his voice carrying the weight of certainty. “To destroy it would condemn the world to something far worse. The core must be absorbed by a compatible body. Only then… may it be contained.”

“Then isolate it. Throw it out of orbit. Into another dimension,” Hal snapped.

“You cannot stop it,” J’onn answered, low and unyielding. “The System is an entity of energy and calculation. It can only be absorbed. Whoever holds it becomes a limit. A cage. But its essence remains. It grows. It moves. It consumes… until it finds a conduit.”

You were barely hearing him anymore. Your eyes were already locked on the core—and inside you, you felt it turn toward you.

Recognition. Like a predator scenting blood.

It slid through your veins like poison that knew your name, as if your entire life had been nothing but a slow preparation for this exact moment.

It could not be shut down. Only taken inside.

And you knew—without doubt—that your body was the only bridge standing between the world and collapse.

Hal’s breathing went uneven. “There has to be another option. Something we’re missing.”

“There isn’t,” J’onn said, and for the first time his voice faltered. “I’ve calculated every outcome. There’s no deviation. No margin. Only this.”

“How long?” you asked. Your voice was steady in the way of someone who already knows they won’t like the answer.

J’onn lowered his gaze, unable to meet yours. “After absorption, the System will continue to evolve. The body that contains it will become an unstable boundary. Sooner or later… it will fail.”

Jordan shook his head, sharp and violent, as if he could dislodge the words through sheer motion. “Then it isn’t a solution. It’s just—”

“Buying time,” you said, already turning away.

He caught your arm before he even realized it. His grip loosened moments later, as if his mind had registered the gesture too late.“You’re not a container,” he said, voice raw. “You’re a person.”

You met his eyes. In yours, he could read the exhaustion of an irreversible choice—the weight of a decision that had never truly existed.

“I’ve always been both.”

J’onn opened his mouth, then closed it again. There was nothing left to add. Everything that mattered already hung between you, unsaid and immovable.

“If no one does this,” you said quietly, “we all die.”

The Lantern stepped toward you. “We’ll find another way.”

“There isn’t one. And you know it.”

Hal followed you into a side corridor, far enough from the core to dim its glow, not far enough to escape its pull. The light there was weaker. Human. You pressed your back to the wall, like you needed something solid to keep you from collapsing.

Hal stopped in front of you. Too close. Too far. Never right.

“You can’t do this,” he said.

Not an order. A refusal.

You shook your head. “Hal—”

“No.” He stepped closer. “You listen to me.” His hand went to his chest, fingers digging in, like the pain had weight.

“I love you.” The words came out bare.

“I love you in a way I don’t know how to survive. In a way that has always frightened me—because it makes me weak, because it makes me jealous, because it turns me into someone I don’t recognize. But it’s true.”

He kept going, helpless against the momentum

“I love you even when you’re distant. I love you even when you cut me open with your silence. I love you even now—now that you’re asking me to break myself apart.”

A laugh tore out of him, cracked, almost a sob.

“But you can’t. You can’t ask me to live after watching you walk into death.”

He moved closer. Too close. He was slowly falling apart

“Stay,” he begged. “Stay and let me try. Let me fail a hundred times. Let me ruin the world if I have to—but do it with me.”

His voice dropped, as if confessing a sin. “I don’t want to save everyone if it means losing you.”

You drew in a breath that trembled. “Hal—”

“No.” He framed your face without quite touching it, his hands shaking in the space between intention and restraint.

“Look at me. Look at me when I tell you that without you, I don’t know how to be anything good.” Tears gathered in his eyes, uncontained.

“Don’t be brave. Don’t be right. Be selfish. Just once. Be selfish with me.” His voice splintered.

“Choose me. Choose us.”

For a long moment, you stayed like that—his face buried against the curve of your neck, his tears warming your chest, your gloved hands threading slowly through his hair. When his breathing finally steadied, you spoke.

“It’s because I love you,” you said softly, “that I can’t.”

He shook his head, desperate. “Then tell me you don’t love me. Tell me I don’t matter.”

A faint, aching smile touched your lips. “If you didn’t matter, I wouldn’t be asking what I’m about to ask.”

He leaned forward again, forehead resting against yours, his breath breaking. “I won’t survive this.”

“I know.”

“I’ll hate you.”

“I know.”

“I’ll never forgive myself.”

You stayed there, eyes locked, while the world beyond the corridor kept moving—unaware, untouched.

“Tell me,” he said hoarsely. “Tell me what you want me to do.”

You inhaled deeply, fully aware of the weight each word would carry.

“When I return from the core,” you said, “don’t wait until I stop being me.” You swallowed. “Kill me while I still am.”

Something broke in him. Not quietly. Not cleanly. A sound tore out of his chest that he couldn’t stop, grief stripped of language. He dragged a hand over his face like he could erase the moment if he tried hard enough.

“Do you understand what you’re asking me?” he said.

“Yes.”

“No,” he snapped, his voice splintering. “You think you do.”

“After absorption, I won’t be just me anymore.”

“Then I’ll stay,” he said immediately. “Whatever you become.”

“That’s what terrifies me.”

He froze. “What?”

“Because I’ll stop being a person,” you said. “I’ll become a function. A boundary. And you—” your breath caught, “you’ll still try to save me.”

“That’s who I am.”

“I know.” Your voice softened. “That’s why you have to promise me now.” He let out a hollow laugh that sounded nothing like humor.

“Promise what? To kill you?”

“To not hesitate.”

He looked at you like you were already slipping away. “You’re asking the one thing I can’t do.”

“No,” you said softly. “I’m asking the one thing you can do for me.”

“If you wait,” you whispered, “if you look for proof that I’m still me… it’ll already be too late.”

“I can’t be the one who—”

“Hal.” You said his name like a last prayer.

“I’ve spent my whole life without a choice,” you said. “This time, I have one. And you’re the only one who can keep me from becoming something I never chose, again.”

Hal trembled. His ring pulsed violently, answering the storm inside him. “And if I can’t?”

“Then I’ll die anyway,” you said. A pause. “But it’ll hurt more than I can bear.”

You took his wrist—not his hands. Never his hands. “Please,” you whispered. “Don’t let me disappear while I’m still alive.” The weight of it crushed him. This wasn’t death.

It was a sentence he would carry forever.

“Look at me,” you said. “If you love me even a little—look at me now. Because after this, there might be nothing left to recognize.”

He raised his eyes to yours. In them was everything—fear, rage, devotion, love with nowhere left to go.

He nodded. Once.

“I promise,” he said, empty. “If you come back… if you’re no longer you… I’ll do it.”

You closed your eyes and fell into his chest, not gently, not carefully—like your body had finally given up. His heartbeat slammed against you, wild and uneven, and his arms snapped around you, crushing, desperate, as if tightening them enough might undo what had already been decided. Like if he held you hard enough, the choice would break instead of you.

The core was a pulsing void, a presence without shape, demanding a body. Its light did not illuminate—it consumed.

You stopped at the threshold, aware that this was the last place where hesitation was still possible.

For a fleeting instant, the thought of turning back brushed your mind.

You dismissed it immediately. Not because the core’s call was irresistible, but because you knew with painful clarity that if you allowed yourself one final glance at Hal, you would never cross that line.

You stepped forward.

The contact was not pain. It was recognition.

The System accepted your body as if it had always been waiting, as if your existence had merely been a delay before this inevitable convergence. Flesh, bone, breath—all of it aligned, yielding to something that had already decided your place in the world.

The first thing it took from you was time.

You were a child again.

Too young to understand the avoidance in your mother’s eyes as she signed the papers , yet old enough to recognize that whatever bound your parents together was not love—not the kind sold in stories or projected on screens. Princes did not strike, and knights did not come home with blood on their hands. Those were lies meant for children, and you had already learned better.

You were too younh to grasp why the word temporary sounded like a sentence, but old enough to know that you would never see your parents again. Somewhere deep inside, in a place you never acknowledged, there was relief. You carried it in silence, like a forbidden truth.

The memory shifted.

The sharp, acrid smell of social services offices filled your senses. The cold floor beneath shoes too large for your feet. The precise, humiliating awareness of being an administrative error—something misplaced, misfiled, unwanted.

The core expanded, feeding on everything you were.

You relived the white rooms of the program. Hands touching you without consent. Needles piercing your skin as you struggled to keep tears from betraying you. The Alchemist never appeared in person—only his voice, calm, polite, terrifyingly kind.

You have potential.

The gloves came first as precaution, then as identity. Your fingers became instruments rather than limbs, incapable of tenderness. Hands restrained, contained, always held at a distance, as though the world itself were radioactive and you its unstable center.

Then came the first mistake.

An innocent kiss, shared with another child. A gesture meant to be harmless that became catastrophic. You saw his eyes again, the life draining from them, the collapse, the screams. Lips turned into guilt. Love transformed into a crime. A new sentence imposed.

The System shuddered, eager.

Training followed—not as education, but as erasure. Every lesson removed something essential: innocence, the right to cry, the ability to ask for help. You remembered the moment you understood the truth: they were not teaching you how to live. They were teaching you how to function.

Then the blackout.

Escape.

You ran with torn gloves and numb fingers, terrified of brushing against another body by mistake. You remembered your first night of freedom, sitting alone, hands clenched tightly on your knees. The man in the alley. His attempt to kiss you. The panic. His breath thick with alcohol. His body collapsing at your feet.

He deserved it, a voice whispered behind you.

Selina came later, like a scar you learn to trace with reluctant fondness. One you could not imagine yourself without. A reminder that you had survived. Nights on worn couches. Long silences. Skilled hands teaching you how to strike, how to fall, how to rise again. Nights when she bound your wrists not to restrain you, but to teach you that you did not need to fear them.

Your hands are not cursed, she once said. You did not believe her. But you wanted to. The love between you was restrained, incomplete, perpetually cautious—never safe enough to fully rest in.

The core grew. It pressed into your chest.

The League followed.

J’onn.

He never feared your hands because he never looked at them. He touched you without touching, entered your mind with a gentleness no human had ever offered. When he said I see you, it was not reassurance—it was fact. He anchored you when memory threatened to overwhelm you, when the past clawed its way back toward the surface.

He never demanded anything. He simply stayed.

Join the League.

The System trembled, sensing the weight of that choice.

Bruce Wayne came next.

He never touched you, and in that absence you felt seen in an entirely new way. His love was measured, restrained, precise. No impulsive gestures. No wasted words. Loving you was a calculation, a mission conducted with the singular goal of minimizing damage.

You remembered how he studied your gloves before meeting your eyes, as though assessing an explosive device.

If you stay, he told you once, I will build a world that never touches you.

You understood that it was love. And with equal clarity, you understood the cost: safety without freedom, protection without breath.

Then came Hal.

Not all at once.

At first, the System did not recognize him as a threat. Hal Jordan was merely a face, a secondary energy signature, an emotional irregularity.

Then he persisted.

His memories were chaos. Fragmented. Contradictory. Impossible to order.

The System slowed. Not a fluctuation, resistance.

Something in the fabric of assimilation faltered, strained by an imperfection it could not resolve. That imperfection had a name.

Hal Jordan.

You relived every moment with him, and the System felt it. His trembling voice. His hands clenched in frustration at his inability to touch you. His jealousy—raw, irrational. The laughter that bordered on hysteria during nights that should have been happy but were instead saturated with longing and pain.

The System attempted to extract what was useful: courage, resolve, the will to protect. But everything about Hal was inseparable from love, fear, desperation.

And his love was incompatible.

Then one memory burned through everything else. Hal removed a single glove. Just one.

A motion so careful it felt like a prayer spoken with shaking hands.

He did not rush. He did not hesitate. There was fear in him—but it was not of you.

He looked at your hand as if it were something sacred, something dangerous, something worth everything. And in the way he moved, in the way his breath stalled, there was a truth he never spoke aloud but that you felt with terrifying clarity.

I do not fear your touch. If dying were the price of holding your hand, I would pay it. If this led me to hell, I would wake there gladly, as long as I had known you for one second without fear.

His bare fingers brushed your wrist. Not grasping.Not claiming. Only resting there, just long enough to mean something, to mean everything. That infinitesimal contact shattered you.

In that single heartbeat lived every promise he had never dared to make. You were not poison, not a weapon, not a curse. You were worth the risk. Worth the consequence. Worth damnation, if that was what loving you required.

Your lungs forgot how to breathe. Your heart bucked violently, as if trying to escape your chest and follow his touch.

The System staggered.

Energy twisted inside you, attempting to absorb, categorize, rationalize. But Hal was chaos—too human, too fragile, too alive to be contained. Love, fear, and tenderness condensed into that single gesture became a fracture in the process.

The System marked him as an anomaly and tried to erase him.

It failed.

Pain, obsession, desperation—every recollection amplified the disruption, forcing the System to bend around something it could not comprehend.

The core pulsed violently. Light flickered. Energy strained to recombine.

Your fingers burned, reaching for him even as you knew they never could. The memory was enough. His love became a barrier within the assimilation, a fragment of humanity the cosmos could not digest.

You collapsed to your knees as the core compressed around you. Your hands shook. Your veins throbbed with the impossible urge to hold him. Your lips wanted to speak, to scream, to laugh and cry at once—but no sound emerged.

Everything you had ever wanted—to touch him, to tell him the truth, to stay, to simply be—was denied, consumed by the heart that beat too fiercely within the memory of the man you loved and within the System devouring you.

You clenched your teeth, holding fast to the last thing that remained yours: that single second of trust. The glove removed. The wrist brushed.

And in that suspended moment, while the world beyond the core held its breath, you understood the truth.

Hal Jordan was not merely a memory.

He was the fracture that ensured the System could never be whole. And you held onto him, even as everything else was taken from you.

“Don’t look at me like that.”

You had almost whispered the words, your voice fragile, trembling, as your body leaned toward nothingness. Every fiber of you screamed to stop him—to stop yourself—to close your eyes and deny everything. And yet, you could not stop searching for him.

He was staring at you, his eyes filled with something that broke you from the inside out: love, fear, desire, raw desperation.

“How could I not look at you?” he said, his voice dying in his throat. “You are everything I have ever looked at.”

Time seemed to freeze. There was nothing beyond the two of you—no light, no world, no breath except your own. The dagger trembled in his hands, uncertain, but Hal did not let it fall. The muscles in his arms were rigid, his face drawn tight, his soul laid bare in every minute movement. You could see the weight of every choice, the entire world pressing down on him—and yet it was you, fragile and powerful all at once, who mattered more than anything else.

“Now,” you whispered, your fingers stretching toward him, shaking. “Now. Please…”

And he hesitated.

For an instant that felt eternal, he lowered the dagger. Then he raised it again, his hands shaking, his eyes fixed on you as if searching for an impossible escape. Every muscle in his body screamed at him to stop, to refuse, to find another way.

“There has to be another way…” he stammered, his voice breaking. “It can’t… it can’t end like this. Not like this…”

You shook your head slightly. Your voice was thin, almost pleading.

“Don’t… don’t make this harder.”

“I love you… I love you…” He said it like a prayer.

The seconds stretched endlessly. His grip on the dagger was uneven, his fingers trembling against the metal. His heart slammed against your chest, as if trying to stop time itself.

And then, slowly, the blade entered your chest.

Straight.

Precise.

Into your heart.

You jolted—a broken breath, your eyes flying open, not from pain but from the shock of still being alive, suspended for a single heartbeat between the world and oblivion. Then you smiled. A tiny, fragile smile. Grateful.

Hal let the dagger fall to the ground. His body folded over yours, shaking, unable to stop holding you. He pressed you against himself, as if his arms could anchor your soul to this world.

“I love you,” he whispered, again and again, tears streaming down his face, his trembling hands tightening and loosening all at once. He could not bear the weight of the choice he had made, your fragility in his arms, the reality of your body already growing cold.

In a gesture that was almost childlike, utterly desperate, Hal brushed his fingers over your gloves. One by one, he removed them, his hands shaking, hesitant, as though even that touch might kill you a second time. Finally, his bare fingers met your skin, and for one infinite second he could hold your hands.

The boundaries that had separated you for so long were crossed by the simplest of gestures.

There was no justice.

No consolation.

Only the warmth leaving your fingers—the proof of what had been real, what had been human: you, fragile and alive in memory, and him, shattered by the choice he had made.

And then it happened.

The core you had absorbed, that had consumed you from the inside, stirred once more. The energy you believed you had contained broke free, sudden and uncontrollable. The System reawakened in its original form, abandoning your body. It was no longer inside you, no longer bound. It floated, pulsed—cold, untamed energy expanding outward, above, below, through everything, as if the entire world had become a resonating chamber for its power.

Void. Light. Pure vibration.

The core had reclaimed itself. And you were left behind—helpless, reduced to an empty vessel.

“No. No. No. NO! ” He murmured it at first, his voice a whisper that turned into a tremor, then into a scream. His hands framed your face, gently moving your head as he searched in vain for a sign—anything—that might tell him your soul still belonged to this world.

He bent forward, his hands buried in his hair, then straightened abruptly, his gaze wild, blinded by pain.

“You said it would work!” he shouted at J’onn, his voice thick with venom and despair. “You said it would be enough—that she—” He broke off, teeth clenched. “That she would stop it.”

He hurled a shard of metal away. The clang rang through the room like thunder, each impact a desperate attempt to tear the pain from his chest.

Clark stepped toward him. “Hal, listen to me—”

“Don’t.”

The Lantern turned sharply. “Don’t you dare suggest I calm down!”

“I drove a dagger through the heart of the woman I loved,” he said, enunciating every syllable. “I felt it go in. I felt her body give way. I watched the light leave her eyes.”

A hollow, fractured laugh slipped from his lips. “And it meant nothing.”

He pointed toward the System pulsing behind him—rebuilt, intact, alive.

“Nothing to this world!”

After that mission you felt different. Everything around you did too. You saw it in Johnny’s eyes the moment you opened yours. Blue, empty, cold. The warmth you desperately clung to in those rare moments of vulnerability was gone—replaced by a void that weighed heavily on your heart. He didn’t say a word.

Those eyes were the first you saw after the mission and the last you ever thought you’d see when you decided to detonate the bomb on your own.

Despite the pounding pain in your head, you remembered everything: the smoke, the footsteps of enemies closing in, your heart threatening to burst from your chest with how fast it was beating. And Johnny was there. He said he would go. That it was his turn. You argued. Your words dissolved into the air as he stepped into the corridor leading to the detonator.

Adrenaline. Fear. The terror of losing someone you couldn’t yet define in your life. Whatever it was, it brought you here: a sterile room, needles piercing your skin, machines screaming relentless beeps into your skull.

But what haunted you most was Johnny’s silence. When you woke up, he was gone. No visits. No messages. Just the ghost of a man who had stopped hiding—and whose absence weighed heavier than any word could ever.

After your recovery, Johnny avoided you like the plague, changing his entire schedule just to avoid meeting your gaze. Mealtimes rearranged, the training room used only when he was certain you weren’t there.

It weighed on you more than you wanted to admit. You had disobeyed him, attacked him from behind—like only the most cowardly would—pinning him to the ground with a cut to his leg. Taking his place. You told him you were sorry before closing the corridor door behind you. The echo of his voice screaming your name haunted your mind, surfacing in nightmares during your first nights in the hospital.

Gaz noticed. Which wasn’t hard to see, especially when two people that seemed incapable of breathing without the other now acted like strangers.

“Johnny doesn’t hate you, it’s just anger he’s feeling,” Kyle tried to reassure you.

“This is temporary. Give him time,” Ghost said, stroking your shoulder.

But despite all the reassurances, Johnny seemed to drift further away, and your patience was cracking under the weight of your own fury.

You waited until the training room emptied—the exact time Soap had decided to take the place—and confronted him. His back was to you, punching the bag with a force that asked no permission.

“Here to stab me a second time?” He said calmly, measured, while continuing his assault on the bag. You stepped beside him, fists clenched, knuckles aching to leave marks.

“Why are you doing this?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” He tried to brush you off. But weeks of buried anger left no room for half-measures.

“You know exactly what I mean. You changed your entire schedule just to ignore me. Went so far as to ask Price to remove me from the last mission. I spent weeks in that disinfectant-stinking room with that deafening beep, and you didn’t even bother to—” You didn’t get the chance to finish.

“You forced me to watch you die! How can you not see it?!” He snapped, shoving you against the wall. Arms framing your head, blocking everything but him.

“You immobilized me, damn it! Left me there, helpless, useless, unable to rip you away from the grip of certain death!” Each word came louder than the last, soaked in either anger or despair—you couldn’t tell, not when he was this close.

“I was the one who found you. You were on that floor, and—damn it. I stayed in that hospital chair, waiting, hoping you’d open your eyes while guilt devoured me from the inside. In that room, stinking of disinfectant, it had to be me there. I had to be annoyed by those machines, not you, Bonnie. Me.” The faint smell of coffee lingered on his breath.

“I’m sorry.”

“No, you’re not,” he said, staring into your eyes as if he could read the truth within them.

“Can you blame me? The same fear that consumed you, that drove you down that corridor, drove me to too.” you admitted, trying to hold his gaze.

He paused. Just a moment. And then he leaned in. Lips to yours.

It started slow, sweet, cautious, afraid of breaking some invisible, intangible balance. Slowly, he pushed further, mouths exploring, making up for all the words unsaid. Hands cupped your face, pressing deeper, more insistent, making up for unsaid words, loud silences, fearful touches daring to go beyond.

When your lips finally parted, Johnny’s hands trembled as they caressed your face, his forehead resting against yours.

“Promise me, Bonnie. Promise me you won’t do it again—”

“You know I can’t,” you said, melting into his gentle touch.