hiraya

The hope didn't survive contact with 9 p.m., for it had withered then, when Jason came home from patrol far earlier than planned, favoring one leg and radiating the specific, wounded pride of a man who has just lost an argument with a sewer-dwelling reptile. Killer Croc, apparently, has recently discovered what Jason called "the cruel beauty of a knife," and decided to test the theory out on him.

He had come home victorious, technically. Bleeding, unfortunately. Sulking, definitely.

“I got thrown into a dumpster, babe. A dumpster.”

Twenty minutes of this now. Jason recounts the injury like he took a bullet instead of a knife scrape, wringing every possible drop of sympathy out of a scrape that, if you're being honest, barely broke skin. “You’ve told me. Four times.”

“It smelled like something died in there.”

“And that’s why I let you use my expensive body wash.”

His eyes harden when they land on you, eyebrows drawing so close together his lashes nearly brush them, offended that you're not offended enough on his behalf.

You know this dance. You've known it for a while now; patching him up on the couch while he narrates the injury of the night like it’s a Greek tragedy or a near-death experience, refusing to admit he’s fine. These are all things you’ve grown accustomed to. You know Jason thinks that admitting he’s fine means you stop fussing over him. And you don't stop. You never do. Not because you're fooled —because you know exactly what he's doing— but because some stubborn, soft part of you simply doesn't want to not fuss over him, logic be damned.

So, with an ice pack applied, dramatics acknowledged fully and bruises kissed better in the vague, non-medical way Jason insists actually helps —somehow you end up riiiight where you are right now. 

As of ten minutes ago, the two of you, apparently, stopped being nurse and patient and became this instead: tangled together on the couch in the most anatomically improbable cuddle in recorded history. 

You’re laying over his chest on the opposite side of the couch (the one he insists is the foot side and not the head side), while he has folded himself around you —arms, legs like a koala. The wound on his thigh, you notice, has suspiciously stopped bothering or pulling at him entirely the second it became an excuse to hold on tighter. He’s clinging onto you, like if he somehow lets go and his humongous, tight muscle legs aren’t wrapped around your ribs and arms and head, the knife-dumpster incident might happen all over again and this time he won’t survive it.

You kind of hope someone from his family breaks into your house and walks in on this right now. Dick for example, would never let him live it down.

“Jace, you're huge and you’re going to suffocate me,” you mumble into the soft cotton of his shirt.

“Good. Then you’ll finally understand my pain.” He whines and punctuates it with a kiss to the crown of your head, entirely too pleased with himself.

The TV throws blue light across the ceiling, across both your faces —some Hulu movie you swore was on your watchlist, though at this point you'd both fail a basic quiz on the plot. Under your ear, his heartbeat runs slow. Slower than it ever seems to anywhere else in the world. Slower than it has any right to be, for a man who spent his evening being launched into municipal waste by a seven-foot crocodile man.

You shift, testing the grip of his koala-limbs, and he only tightens them.

“Nuh-uh. Stay.”

“I’m not going anywhere, I just want to check your leg.”

“My leg is fine as long as you don’t move.”

You ignore him, sliding down anyway, working yourself loose from the tangle of his arms —and the increasingly alarming attempt his legs make to get you in a headlock— until you're settled near his knees, running your eyes over the bandage like you don't trust your own patch up handiwork from twenty minutes ago. Jason watches you with exaggerated suspicion, visibly bracing for whatever indignity comes next.

Instead, you rest your head against his stomach. His muscles don't jump the way they usually do when you catch him off guard; he just breathes, slowly, letting you settle. You run your palm along the back of his thigh, over the fabric of his sport shorts, absent and easy, more habit than intention.

"See something you like down there?" he tries, aiming for smug, because, despite all the softness you are alarmingly close to what’s the start of a raging erection. He mostly lands on pink, however—the blush climbing his cheeks giving him away before the sentence even finishes.

“Nah…I’m checking for more injuries.”

Jason clicks his tongue and rolls his eyes before setting them onto yours. “Real romantic, doc.”

You press your thumb lightly behind his knee, testing, and feel him go still.

“Jason?”

“It’s fine. Nothing’s wrong there.”

But his voice has changed. Gone careful. And when you glance up, he’s not looking at you with his big, green eyes anymore and you hate it he’s found something fascinating on the ceiling and he’s looking at it, over your head, cheeks colored cherry red and he's clearly decided there's no point pretending otherwise.

You don't tease. Not with words, anyway. You just lean your head a little and there! You press a kiss to the inside of his thigh, then up, up up, until you reach the soft, thin and ticklish skin just inside his knee. Then, you place another kiss there, soft, unhurried, a little wet, barely anything at all, really.

Jason however, makes a sound like the air’s been knocked clean out of him, which—fair and square—you knew would happen. He’s the most sensitive on spots where his skin is thin and his veins peak blue beneath it. 

Kissing those most sensitive spots, however? That’s exactly what makes him feel loved. It’s the kind of affection that doesn't have to be spoken out loud to exist so soundly.

It’s proof. And Jason likes proof.

"Okay," he says, voice wrecked in the quietest way you've ever heard it. "That's—oookay. Mmh.” You kiss him again, same spot on the other leg. “Baby! That's nice."

“What?”

“Nothing.” He breathes in, slow, and his hand finds your hair; not pulling, not pushing, just resting there, warm and a little unsteady. “Do that again, baby. A little higher maybe?”

Who are you to say no?

Dick Grayson—The back of his neck/his traps

Dick is the one who takes care of you. That’s just how it’s always gone, since the very beginning.

He’s the one who notices you haven’t eaten before you do, he’s the one who has a bandaid produced from some pocket dimension in his jacket before you’ve even finished saying ‘ow,’ and he’s the one who somehow always knows which version of ‘I’m fine’ you actually mean and which one he needs to push back on.

You’ve never really had to learn how to do it back, he’s never given you the opening. It is a rare thing for Dick Grayson to let the role of the caregiver slip from his hands, it’s even rarer that he finds himself in a position where he needs to be taken care of.

Which is maybe why it takes you three days too long to notice that Dick Grayson —the most relentlessly, exhaustingly, perfectly fine person you have ever met— has stopped sleeping entirely.

It’s small at first. He’s a little slower getting out of bed. A little quicker to laugh at something that isn’t that funny, like he’s testing whether the sound still works right. Gone are his power-naps throughout the day. Coffee at 2 p.m., which never used to happen, followed by coffee at 6 p.m, which really never used to happen.

Bludhaven’s been ugly lately; you know that much. You’ve seen the new set of bruises and wounds he tries to angle away from you in the bathroom mirror— but Dick doesn’t come home tired the way other people come home tired. He usually shakes it off by the time he’s through the door, replaces it with that easy grin like he’s swapped costumes rather than just taken one off.

Tonight he doesn’t manage the swap. He just stands in the kitchen doorway for a second too long, staring at the kettle like he’s forgotten what it’s for.

You don’t ask him what’s wrong. Not yet. You’ve learned that with Dick, straight questions get you straight deflection —a joke, a subject change, an ‘I’m good,’ promise delivered with enough charm that you almost believe it every single time, even now. So instead, you do something you’ve never really done before: you decide to take care of him first.

You run the bath before he can talk you out of it. Water hot enough to actually do something for the knot you can see sitting between his shoulder blades, the lights low, the ridiculous lavender thing his sister-in-arms-slash-honorary-sister got him as a joke gift finally getting used for its intended purpose. When you come back to find him, he’s sitting on the edge of the bed, elbows on his knees, chin in his palms, staring at nothing in the specific way that means he’s a thousand miles away and hasn’t noticed yet that his feet have stopped thudding on the floor.

“Hey,” you say, quiet, and watch him startle back into his body. “C’mon. Something’s ready for youu.”

“You didn’t have to—”

“I know.” You take his hand, slowly lacing his fingers with yours. “Get up.”

He doesn’t fight you on it, which tells you more than anything he’s said out loud in the last three days. Dick always has a comeback loaded, a joke to buy himself room to wriggle out of being looked after and yet, tonight he just follows you, quietly sighing, into the bathroom, and lets you peel his shirt off like something in him has finally run out of the energy it takes to perform being okay.

You settle him into the water and kneel by the tub, sleeves shoved up, lathering shampoo in your hands before running your fingers through his damp curls, rubbing soothing circles all over his head and working the tension out of his shoulders with your hands the way he’s done for you more times than you can count. He exhales, slow, head tipping forward, and for a second the exhaustion in his face isn’t hidden behind anything at all.

It’s just there, plain, the way he never lets you see it.

His neck is where you always end up, working the pads of your thumbs into the muscle where his traps meet his upper spine, the one spot that undoes him faster than anywhere else on his whole ridiculously overworked body. You feel it the second you find it —the shudder that runs down through his shoulders, the way his breath goes long and unsteady, like something’s finally been let out of a room it’s been locked in for days.

You lean down and press a kiss right there, at the slope of the back of his neck, soft, lingering half a second longer than the ones before it.

He makes a small sound, almost startled, like he wasn’t expecting to feel that at all after everything else, and his hand comes up out of the water to find your wrist, holding on like an anchor.

“Dick.” You keep your voice as gentle as you can make it, mouth still close to his skin. “What’s wrong?”

For a long moment, he doesn’t answer as much as he won’t even look at you. You can feel him working through it though— probably thinking about the joke he could make, the deflection sitting right there, ready to go, easy as breathing. You watch him choose not to reach for it.

“I don’t know how to say it without it sounding stupid,” he finally says, voice rougher than you’ve heard it in a long time.

“Try anyway?”

His shoulders drop another inch under your hands, like just being asked —really asked, and meant and kissed to absolute persuasion— has already taken some of the weight off. “It’s Damian, Jason, Bruce, Tim, Steph—just…everyone. I feel like I have to substitute for all of them.”

You don’t let go of him nonetheless. You stay right there, thumbs still working slow circles into his shoulders, and for a while neither of you says anything else, you just listen to the water lapping faintly against the edge of the tub, his breathing evening out under your hands one long exhale at a time.

Then, of course, because he’s Dick Grayson and staying vulnerable for longer than four consecutive minutes seems to be physically painful for him, he turns his head just enough to catch your eye, and you can already see the grin rebuilding itself.

“Okay, my turn.”

“Your turn for what?”

“You’ve been standing there hunched over a bathtub for ten minutes.” He twists further, water sloshing, and catches your wrist properly this time, tugging you down so your face is level with his. “That’s a crime against your own back. I should know, I know all about backs.”

“Dick—”

He kisses you before you can finish the sentence —unhurried, easy, tasting faintly of lavender bath stuff he’ll never admit to liking and it’s a genuinely excellent distraction technique, you’ll give him that. When he finally pulls back an inch, his voice has dropped into the low, warm register he uses when he’s trying to talk you into something.

“C’mon. Get in. I give a great massage, ask literally anyone I’ve ever met.” He says between kisses.

“That’s not a real reference.”

“It’s a very real reference. Everyone would vouch for me.”

“No one would not vouch for you right now, they’d tell you to go to bed.”

“Semantics.” He’s already shifting, making room in the water, doing his best impression of a man who is definitely not one bad night’s sleep away from falling asleep sitting up. “Come on. Let me take care of you too babyyyyyy. I’m very good at iiiiit. It’s, like, my whole thing.”

You almost laugh, because he is doing the thing—the classic Dick Grayson maneuver, charm first, deflection built in, hand it back to you before you can look too closely at him. It’s smooth. It’s always smooth. And it would probably work, if you hadn’t spent the last ten minutes with your hands on his shoulders, close enough to see exactly what’s sitting under his eyes.

So instead of getting in, you kneel back down at the side of the tub, take his face in both hands, squeeze his cheeks between your fingers and just look at him for a second.

“Nuh-uh,” you say, gentle, echoing something that sounds suspiciously like a line he’s used on you before. “Not tonight.”

“I’m serious, I’m an excellent masseuse, I have—”

“Dick.” You press your thumb lightly under one eye, where the tiredness has gone faintly purple, soft as a bruise. “Look at you. You can barely keep your eyes open.”

“I can absolutely keep my eyes open, I am extremely awake, I—” He punctuates this by yawning, spectacularly, mid-sentence, which rather undercuts the argument.

You just raise an eyebrow at him.

“Okay, that was bad timing,” he admits, and finally, finally, some of the performance drops out of his voice, leaving something quieter underneath. “I just don’t love the idea of you doing all the work tonight.”

“I know.” You kiss his forehead, then, soft, right where the tension always shows up in small wrinkles. “That’s kind of the point of tonight, though. Let me have this one sweetheart.”

He studies you for a second, some last flicker of protest sitting behind his eyes, and then it goes out of him all at once, shoulders dropping back into the water.

“Fine,” he mutters, but he’s smiling through his pout when he says it, “But can I eat you out later?”

“No, you’re gonna sleep later!”

“I’d sleep better if my girlfriend loved me, though!”

Bruce Wayne—The middle of his chest

You have stopped waiting up on the couch since a long time ago. Nowadays, you just leave the bedside lamp on low and let sleep take you when it wants to, trusting the soft click of the study's hidden door, then the shower running two floors down, to eventually end with the mattress dipping under a weight far too careful for a man his size.

Tonight, it takes longer than usual and you know better than to ask. Pressing Bruce for an answer he doesn’t carry within him has only proven to be futile, anxiety inducing even, and you’ve long exchanged your worry for the sake of his nirvana.

You're half into a dream when the door finally opens, and Bruce —no cowl, no cape, no careful mask of ‘fine’ on his face either, for once— comes to a stop at the foot of the bed like he's not sure he's allowed to be tired yet.

"You're late tonight honey," you murmur, not really awake enough to make it sound like an accusation.

"Traffic." His voice is low, wry, worn thin at the edges. "Terrible this time of night."

You don't call him on the lie. You never really have to. The new bruise darkening along his ribs when he finally peels his shirt off does that for you, blooming an ugly constellation of yellow, green and purple over what you're fairly sure used to be a much worse midnight-blue, days-old and reopened.

"Sit down," you say, already reaching for the little tin of arnica cream on the nightstand that has, over the years, become as much a fixture of this room as the lamp.

He sits.

Bruce doesn't narrate his injuries the way some of his kids do. He doesn't perform pain, doesn't dramatize a scrape into a saga. If anything, he goes the other way; quiet, frozen body, giving you nothing, because admitting it hurts and hurt overall are a tactical disadvantage he can't simply afford. You've learned to read him in the small things instead: the too-careful way he lowers himself onto the mattress, the exhale he thinks he's hiding, the fact that he lets you touch him at all instead of waving you off with some line about a five-minute recovery in the cave.

You press your palm flat over the worst of the bruising, feather-light, and watch something in his shoulders finally loosen. Your hand there, on that specific spot, is doing more for him than the mask ever could.

"Why didn’t you call Alfred?"

"Alfred's asleep."

"Alfred's never asleep."

The corner of his mouth twitches, almost a smile, gone as fast as it came. He's watching you work with the same unreadable focus he gives everything —case files, nightly cityscapes, you when he knows fairly well you’re not looking at him— there's something in the careful movement of your hands in the dimmed light, he's trying to memorize.

He hopes, faintly, because hope has proven to be a poisonous, dangerous thing for someone like him to have, that he never has to spend a night where this is not in his routine anymore.

And then, as he’s watching you a little more, he wonders if you’re sick of him. If this is something you really want to do, if allowing himself the novelty of letting you take care of him is a thing that is pushing you away and you refuse to speak of it so as to not hurt him. 

He fears, on a basis that borderlines casually, that you have grown scared of his reactions, thus the reason you have mellowed down from how worried you used to be when he first met you.

Stuck between a rock and a hard place, mind flowing with every thought imaginable and contingency plans that involve even you, he has to admit, that for the worst part of it—it’s easier to be Bruce like this, with his face half lit, and someone who loves him enough to offer him something that counts as mundane with the life he’s chosen to lead. 

You finish applying the last of the cream and don't pull your hand back right away. Instead, you let it rest, flat, right over the center of his sternum, over the place where, absurdly, for a man built out of scar tissue and armor plating, he seems to feel things the most.

He goes so still under your palm, stiller than the bruised ribs. Stiller than you've ever managed to make him with the stethoscope of a worried question.

"Bruce."

"Hm."

"You're allowed to just be tired, you know. Just here. With me."

He doesn't answer, not right away, he has to sigh first, long and deep like that will clear his lungs out of every horror he’s had to fight tonight. When he does answer, though, his voice has dropped into something quieter than the Batman voice he ever lets anyone hear, it’s something that belongs only to this room, this lamp, this hour, you.

"I know."

And you know, that despite what he says, he feels the opposite. 

But you care too much for him to press further.

You care so much, in fact, that you decide to ignore the inanimate pain that settles inside your ribs at the thought of ever hurting him, just to throw yourself onto his lap, ever so softly. Or, perhaps, as soft as you can manage.

“You okay?”

“More than,” he says, and means it as much as a man like him can mean anything spoken out loud at two in the morning, ribs taped, guard down for maybe the only ten minutes of this week.

“You get quiet like that and I never know if it’s a case, or the ribs, or—” You don’t finish it. You don’t have to. Some sentences he’d rather answer with silence than a lie, and you’ve learned not to make him choose between the two.

“It’s not you,” he says instead, low, like the words cost him something to hand over. “It’s never you.”

Again, you don’t ask him to explain further. Bruce hands things over in pieces, on his own schedule, and pressing for the rest of it only sends him further back behind his own eyes. 

So you just nod, and let your palm stay where it is, warm against his sternum, over the drum of a heartbeat that hasn’t slowed down since you settled in his warmth.

“I love you.”

Something shifts in his face — small, almost nothing, it’s not relief, exactly, as much as it hurts. It’s closer to disbelief that the offer’s still on the table to say he loves you back, after everything.

“I know,” he says “I love you too.”

And although it doesn’t sound like he fully believes it but rather like he wants to, you know how much he means it.

It’s in his eyes, doe and kind, despite the way his eyebrows are slightly furrowed, and it’s in the way his hand has found the small of your back, just so he holds you steady onto him.

You slowly lean closer, pressing your lips to the soft skin at the center of his chest —right where your hand had been, right over that too-fast heartbeat, right in between a four clawed scar. 

It’s not a stitch, or a bandage, or even the muscle ache balm, but it’s just what it is.

It makes his breath falter and audibly loosen inside his lungs. His other hand comes up to rest against the back of your head, guiding you just a finger’s worth of space back, so he can look you in the eyes—the light glittering little specks and sparks over your irises. 

He knows his have none; he often wonders why you want to hold eye-contact with him in spite of it, but when you kiss the same spot from a moment ago again, even slower this time and he gets no warning but the goosebumps that run up his back, he thinks, maybe, just maybe, he doesn’t have to think of an emotionally exit plan in case nights like this cease to exist.

Tim Drake—The side of his ribs

Tim has exactly one weakness, and you find it completely by accident on a Tuesday.

He’s stretched out on the couch, laptop balanced on his knees, three different browser windows open —and those are the ones on Safari only— that are probably three different crimes he’s solving simultaneously, and you’re just trying to steal the spot next to him without making him move. You climb over his legs, lose your balance slightly, and catch yourself with a hand flat against his side to keep from faceplanting into the cushions.

Tim makes a sound you have never, in the entire time you’ve known him, ever, heard him make.

It’s somewhere between a yelp and a laugh, high and startled, and his whole body jackknifes sideways so fast the laptop nearly goes sliding off his knees. He catches it on reflex (Batfamily reflexes don’t clock out just because you’ve been tickled) but his face has gone a genuinely spectacular shade of red.

In hindsight, you should’ve seen it coming, but this is the moment when it clicks in your head!

Tim is… ticklish?!

You stare at him, one eyebrow raised, lips slightly thrown open as you’re clocking his whole face. He simply stares back, betrayed, blushing harder than before.

“Timothyyyyyy, did you just squeak?”

“No.” He squints for a second, suspiciously studying your face for any sign of sudden realization, or the early and immediate construction of an evil masterplan against him. He shrugs, too casually when he finds neither.

“Tim.”

“I did not squeak. That was a completely normal, dignified reaction to being startled.”

“You squeaked.”

Hmmm… something in him isn’t fully convinced you are not plotting against him.

“I have never squeaked in my life.” He’s already shifting the laptop further away from you, arm coming down defensively over his side like you’re a known threat now, which is fair, considering. “This conversation is over. We’re not doing this.”

And he’s right, okay? You, as in the two of you, are not doing anything! You, as a person on your own though? Oh you are absolutely doing this.

It takes you the better part of a week and some forced silent treatment that probably hurts you more than him, maybe, to actually get him to admit the specific location of his ticklishness and its overall existence; Tim treats personal weaknesses with the same operational security he treats safehouse addresses, and for a while your only intel is a single data point: somewhere along his ribs, left side, and a truly wounded look every time you bring it up. He starts flinching preemptively whenever you reach for anything near him, which honestly gives you more information than he probably means to.

Tonight, though, he’s not thinking about defense. He’s curled up against you on the couch, laptop finally, blessedly closed, head tucked against your shoulder and cheek squeezed perfectly over your tits in the exact way he likes it. Ah, yes, the rare unguarded quiet that only shows up after he’s been awake so long and he’s stopped pretending he isn’t exhausted. His guard’s down. His arm isn’t over his side. He’s just there, warm, half-asleep against you, breathing slow.

You’ve never been able to resist a soft target.

And while you’d love to start tickling him until he feels absolutely tortured, you don’t exactly want to risk a fight or flight response that will end up with you having a broken nose caused by instant reflexes. Because one! You should never, ever, creep up on one of the bats when they’re half asleep (they have ninja starts in their fucking underwear for all you know and you have watched Tim throw one to the TV when he got jumpscared by a loud sound once) and two! You’re pretty sure you can’t actually trigger a response from Tim, because no matter how soft he pretends he is, he is guarded around you, has been for like—a week— and he will play-wrestle you until you tap out!

Which you will, because you love it and it kinda was the reason you fell so hard for him in the first place?! Yeah yeah, I know.

So, plan ‘B’ for how to torture tickle Tim Drake, includes something even more sinister than just jumping him in his sleep. Something he will not be able to resist.

Once you have secured he is a little softer, but not entirely out like a light, you shift and bend carefully, until your mouth is level with the strip of skin where his shirt’s ridden up slightly at his side, and you press a slow kiss right there, against his ribs. To make it overkill you flick out your tongue and run it on him, while trying to sink your teeth into the skin you’re sucking into your mouth.

Aaaaaaaand Bingo!!! Tim comes alive like he’s been electrocuted.

“No—” It comes out somewhere between a laugh and a shriek, and a moan and he’s twisting away, curling in on himself, all long limbs and zero coordination, trying to simultaneously escape and swat you off with uncoordinated flailing and have his free hand cup his shorts, because you know and he knows, he’s instantly hard. “That’s—come ooooon—that’s cheating!”

“Don’t care.”

You kiss him again, same spot, then everywhere around it, blowing air out of your throat to make farting sounds and he collapses into helpless laughter, breathless and pink-faced and utterly undone, batting weakly at your shoulder with a hand that has zero actual follow-through behind it.

“Okay —okay, truce, truce, I surrender—”

“You can’t surrender on this, Tim.”

“No no, I can.” He’s still laughing, gasping around it, curled half into your lap now like the only way to survive is to make himself a smaller target, and when he finally goes still again, it’s with his face tucked against your collarbone, ears still pink, glaring up at you with absolutely no actual heat behind it.

“You’re the worst,” he informs you.

“Hehehe. You love it.”

“I really, deeply do not.”

But he doesn’t move away. If anything, he settles in closer, arm looping loosely at first, then securely around your waist, guard fully down now that the ambush is apparently over, kissing the middle of your chest and the expanse of your breasts hungrily even over your tank top, bucking his hips right over your thigh—and you file that reaction away for future reference, the exact spot, the exact sound, filed right next to all the other things about him you’ve slowly learned nobody else gets to see.

Your shirt is off before you even finish thinking about it, however. 

~All rights reserved: @/strawberry-nugget, 2026. Please do not copy, over write or steal my work // Likes and reblogs are so appreciated but if you you liked this you can let me know in the comments <3

A/N: Batboys headcanons except i know ball lmaooooo if i get completely deranged and include alfred in pt2 what are you going to do about it huh?

uhhh let me know if you could catch the parallels in this, it would make me really really happy, also if you want me to give you more headcanons my askbox is open!