sunny :)

Adrian believes in a lot of weird shit, but that was the night that made him believe in magic. You, amazing, beautiful you, his best friend in the whole world was holding his hand, without even cringing! No one else in that room mattered. Why would they when he had the love of his (teenage) life dancing with him. 

Of course, you were dancing as friends though. That's what you told him when you asked. This was just a dance as friends. You were just his prom date as friends. You were just holding his hand as a friend.

While the crowd moved and mingled, you slowly pulled him further and further toward the door. Gut told him this may happen. Well, he said something like 'Yeah, if pigs fly, maybe she’ll suck you off behind the bleachers', but that was kind of along the same lines. His heart was beating like a hammer inside his chest, he just hoped you couldn’t feel how sweaty his palms were.

The door led out into the main hallway, and you led Adrian along behind you. He was more than happy to tail after you, as long as you kept holding his hands. While you snuck around, you were trading stolen laughs and in that moment he knew that night was the night. He’d ask you to be his girlfriend. 

When you finally reached the girl’s toilets, his whole body froze and he stood rigid. He couldn’t go in, that was against the rules, and like, the law. 

“Wait here, I gotta grab something.”

“Do you need to get a tampon?” He asked earnestly, ever the feminist. 

Your laugh was addictive as you declined. A few moments later, you had changed. You were wearing a graphic shirt and a pair of old shorts. Not yours, a hand me down from your older brother. Baseball shoes caked in dry dirt. A big red duffel bag slung over your shoulder. Three pins on the front pocket of the bag, a pokemon pin, your favourite starter, a band pin and a tiny enamel owl pin. 

“Come on, we can’t stop now.” You whispered, like it was just some silly game. He was stupid enough to believe it was. You led him by the hand to the door.

The music was still blaring inside the gymnasium, some song he hated.

He used to like it, but that night tainted the song for him. Every time it played at work he grit his teeth until it faded out. The ghost of you on his shoulder until the music transitioned into another equally cheesy tune. Even though you were gone, you lingered like an aftertaste. 

But back there you were, prom dress stuffed in the bag, standing in the school’s parking lot under the flickering lights. Apparently working lights ‘weren’t in the budget’ but they could always find money for the football team or the cheerleaders. Weird. 

You had stashed the bag away during school, above one of the ceiling panels in the girls toilet. Inside the bag was: a change of clothes, three thousand and three hundred dollars (all in cash) and your important documents. Birth certificate, IDs, anything you’d need to be independent. To be free. 

This wasn’t a spur of the moment idea. You’d been planning your escape for a year. 

Sneaking out after school to work at the restaurant downtown, saving all the tips you could. Doing odd jobs- babysitting, car washing, grocery pickups, yardwork, anything. All so you could escape your father. Auggie, August, Smith. 

You wanted to bring your older brother with you, but it was pointless. He was sickeningly loyal to your tyrant of a father. A dog. Auggie could kick, shout and spit on Chris, and he’d stay at his heel. 

He was a lost cause. If you were going to get out, it had to be soon, lest you turn out like him. 

But Adrian, he had to come with you. Since middle school you’d always had each other's back. 

There was something inside you, some invisible signal, that told everyone to avoid you. Maybe it was behind your eyes, or stuck in your teeth. Something about you made others steer clear. You had a couple friends, but you never let them in, always at an arms length.

Not like Adrian. Instead of being repulsed by your signal, he was drawn into it, like waves coming to shore. You could admit he was strange, but his lack of shame and unabashed authentic nature endeared him to you. 

The air in the parking lot was thick with anticipation, to him at least. He was waiting for you to explain why you took him out of the gymnasium. Was this going to be his first kiss? Of course! You must be into him like he’s into you! That explains why you were sneaking around! Okay well it doesn’t explain the bag- but who cares! This is the happiest day of his life!-

“I’m skipping town and never coming back. My ride’s gonna be here in two minutes. Come with me.” you blurted out with direct eye contact. You were still holding his hand.

“I feel the same- what?”

No. No this isn’t happening. What are you talking about? Why would you want to leave? 

“Adrian, if I don’t leave now, I never will. This town is a hellhole- there is nothing here for me-us. Cmon you know we’ve never belonged here. I’ve got a friend with a sister a couple states over, she said I can move in with her as long as I pull my weight around the house. Come with me, I’ve got some cash saved- we’ll get jobs, we’ll figure something out. Just please, I need you to come with me.” 

His feet felt frozen to the ground. It was all too much too fast. Why didn’t you tell him any of this? Before he could open his mouth to speak, the sound of a car horn sliced the air. Your eyes shot wide, thinking your father had caught you mid get away, but softened when you saw it was your soon to be roommate waiting for you. 

“Adrian, I’m going now. Are you coming with me?” 

When he couldn’t find the words, you made your decision. 

“I’ll miss you.” 

He still thinks about the kiss on the cheek you left him when he feels lonely. When his coworkers make fun of him behind his back, he prods the spot on the left side of the face. 

All these years later, you’re still thinking of him too. 

You’ve changed over the years. Worked hard, met new people, distanced yourself from your ‘family’. 

The first two years were great, but it went downhill quicker than you could keep up with. First your new roommate decided that she actually wanted her boyfriend to move into the space you had been given, so you had to find your own place. 

A small apartment in the bad part of town. Landlord who never answered the phone when you needed maintenance but was always calling first thing in the morning when rent was due. Neighbours who loved to scream and shout at each other all hours of the night. 

Now, you were just trying to get by. Sure it wasn’t glamorous, or easy, but it was safe. You could come home and know that no one would hurt you. You never tiptoed in your own house. 

The day started like normal. You woke up, washed, dressed, made the bed, ate breakfast and left for work. You didn’t love your job but the pay was fine and the hours were okay. Admin work was easy enough, you would take calls and respond to emails in the comfort of your booth. Not a lot of face to face interaction. It was enough to pay the bills at least. It kept the life you built for yourself safe. 

But on your way to work, in your shitty car that always had something wrong with it, you got that call. 

You promised yourself you’d never speak to him or see him again, that your old life was behind you now, and you didn’t need him anymore. But when the phone rang, it made you feel like a child again. At first you wanted to let it go to voicemail, that would show him. But he never calls. Ever. Curiosity got the best of you. 

“What?”

“That's how you’re gonna talk to your old man? No respect, you never had any manners. Bitch.” August ‘Auggie’ Smith. Your father. 

“I’m driving.” You hoped he couldn’t tell how scared you were.

“I’m not dying to talk to you either. Your brother’s in jail.”

“What?!” you slammed the brakes, thankful that the street was empty. The car jolted to a stop and sent you forward. “How-why- why is he in jail, why are you so calm about this? Is he okay? What happened?” your fingers were trembling as you held onto the wheel with your free hand. Carving tiny grooves into the pleather wheel. 

You always knew he’d do something stupid and get himself killed or locked up, it was always just a matter of time. But now the time came, you weren’t ready.

“Stop being hysterical. I don’t care what he did. He left his stupid bird here. Get it or I’m gonna throw it out into the woods.” He hangs up without waiting for your answer. 

Truthfully, you wanted to keep driving to work. Forget about the whole thing. Wash your hands of it all. They weren’t family. You hadn’t spoken to them in years. You didn’t need them.

But you knew your father. You knew ‘throw it out’ was code for ‘I’ll shoot it between the eyes and mount it on the wall.’

So you turned around. 

That's how Eagly came into your life. You took him away and kept him at your place. It was like living with a new born. Always screaming for something, knocking stuff over, eating what he shouldn’t. You had to pry a fork out of his beak before he could eat it. It was a whirlwind for a couple months.

Once the landlord heard his never ending screaming he kicked you out. The small home you created had to be packed up and moved out. 

Your job was good, not great, so after being kicked out of the modest home you loved, you swallowed your pride and packed up. 

A smaller, shittier apartment, in an even worse part of town. The landlord didn’t give a shit about Eagly, just that you paid your rent, in cash, and didn’t cause him any other problems. When you asked if he needed a background check he laughed in your face. 

You settled. Learnt to live with the fact your life fell apart through no fault of your own. 

Everything was fine, for four years and five months. Then Chris got out of jail.

“What do you mean you don’t know where he is? Fuck Dad I asked one thing- one fucking thing- I just wanted you to keep my best friend alive-”

“I don’t give a shit about that feathery prick. Not my problem.” Auggie didn’t bother looking over his shoulder. Chris threw his hands up to his head, trying to keep his brain from exploding. “House aint a damn zoo.” 

“He could be dead.” Chris shouted, exasperated.

“Probably. She probably stuffed those feathers into a pillow.” He laughed, cruelty buttering his gravelly voice. 

“She? Fuck sake. You gave my best friend away to some chic? God dammit.”

“Don’t let her hear you call her that. She’d get all pissy. You know what she’s like.” 

“No I don’t- did you miss the part where I was in prison for four years!? How am I suppose to know the ladies you bring back? I don’t even wanna know.”

A dry, wheezing laugh escaped Auggie, and while it warped into a cough, he managed to rasp out “Four years and you’re still dumber than a pile of rocks. Your sister, idiot. That ingrate came and took the bird.” 

Chris froze, stood to full height. Your name had become a taboo in that house. Only to be said when Auggie wanted to prattle on about all the ‘sickness’ in the world.

“Y/N came back?” The whisper of hope in his voice was unhidden. You were back? Did you finally decide to come home? Just his luck that you came back while he was in prison. 

“Came and left. Didn’t say a word to me. Like always. Damn bitch storming in my house and walking like she owns the place.” Auggie’s voice held no affection for you. It never did. Auggie wasn’t a subtle man. When he hated someone, they knew it. And he hated everyone. But there was a special hatred for you. 

“She say where she went?” Chris hoped that his question came off as nonchalant. He wanted Auggie to think that this was just about the bird. Your big brother definitely wasn’t mentally planning to march to yours and demand to know why you never visited him. Or make up for lost time. Although with the two of you it would probably end up in a shouting match. Definitely. 

“You deaf? Said she didn’t say nothing. Came in, took the damn bird and left.” 

The car ride home was painfully silent. Prison had been quiet too, but when he was driving before everything went to shit, Eagly was always there to squawk along to the radio. Or just scream. His chirping made the car feel less empty. Bummed out, he made a stop at the liquor store. Bag full of chips and beer, and an empty heart, he pulled into the trailer park. 

Any other day, he would’ve tracked his best friend down guns blazing. But tonight, his first night of freedom, he wanted nothing more than a smoke and a drink. Eagly was a big bird now, he could fight. He’d seen him peck a man's eyes out once. That being said, he just hopes Eagly didn’t maul you while he was away.

The night air on the porch felt great. Under the open sky, it hit him that he currently had no obligations to anyone. He had weasled his way out of Waller’s thumb, ran from the cops and now he was back where he belonged. With nothing to do. And no one. 

To drown out the bitchy ‘I’m so lonely’ thoughts, he cranked up the speaker. Some hair metal band he liked as a kid. It brought him back to being eight. Keith would’ve been what, ten? That would’ve made you a toddler. While he and Keitch were rocking out, you were in your cot. Instead of crying over the noise, you were dancing. As well as a baby could. You probably didn’t get the music, you were just copying them. 

Those moments always stuck with him, when it was just the three of you. He didn’t mind being a middle child. He never called himself ‘the oldest’. It felt wrong, even for him. But you did. You used to call him ‘your biggest brother’. 

God what happened to you? When did you change? Both of you. 

He checked his phone, rolled his eyes when he saw a backlog of voicemails from Adrian, whatever, he could delete those later, but paused when he saw one from you. One. You’d been gone over a decade, and you sent him one call. And he missed it. 

Hey, its me. Uh, Y/N. Listen, Auggie told me to get your bird- hey! Hey! Stop that! That's not food! sorry - your bird is tearing up my front room- but he’s with me. Listen I don’t know where you are, or what you’re up to, but he’s here and you need to pick him up. And change his name, cmon man what kinda name is Eagly? Would you call your son sonny? 

Ok call me when- if- you can. Uh. Bye. 

There was a hesitation in your voice, like you wanted to say something else at the end but didn’t have the guts to go through with it. In character for you, he thinks. You were never the brave one, he was the one who always had to beat up the kids who spoke about you behind your back. You just pretended you couldn’t hear them. 

Chris held his head in his hands for a long moment. 

Then presses his screen, eyes still closed, and calls back. 

“It’s me, I got your message. Could you drive Eagly back here? I don’t have my car back yet. I’m not gonna Uber that’ll be way too much. Y/N, when you're back I think we should talk.” 

“Y/N’s coming back?” 

Oh god no. Chris’ eyes open and he checks the screen. He called Adrian’s voicemail. Not yours. He groans and feels a migraine coming on. Fuck sake.

Adrian can’t believe what he’s hearing. First Peacemaker’s back, now you! 

“I can drive us! In the vigilantemo- my normal car.” he switches carefully, lest anyone hear. “My normal car. That anyone could drive. Because I'm a normal guy.” 

Chris weighs his options and with reluctance he answers. “I don’t even know where she’s living. How far are you cool to drive?” 

“Coolio to drive anywhere. But I gotta be back by 7pm tomorrow, Fargo's on and my stupid Mom won’t tape it for me. Can you believe that?”

“You still live with your Mom?”

“I’ll come round in the morning- dude this is our first road trip, it’ll be totally like a buddy cop movie! I’ll make a playlist-”

“Cool, great thanks Adrian, see you tomorrow.” 

He hangs up and sighs. Fucking great. 

When he makes sure to click on your voicemail this time, he hesitates. Chris isn’t sure he’s ready to hear your voice yet. Or to really speak to you. 

Unknown number Hey Buggy, it's Chris.  I just got out today- Dad said Eagly’s with you. I’m gonna come by tomorrow, text me you address

You don’t reply. 

No, two hours later you do. 

Buggy Ok I’m not giving you my address. There’s a park, I’ll text you the address. Meet me there.

When the address comes through he sends it to Adrian 

Unknown number- Chris (block after bird) Got it. What time?

Buggy

Any time. Not working tomorrow

You both iron out the details. 

Tomorrow, Chris will come and take Eagly off your hands. 

You aren’t looking forward to seeing him at all, but you’ll just have to get it over with. As if he can sense something is wrong, Eagly hops closer to your leg and chirps at you a couple times, titling his narrow head left and right. 

Despite the rocky start, when he would rip your couch apart and scream all hours of the day, you truly have grown attached to him. He’s more like a dog than a bird to you. The cold air of the fridge whispers over your arm when you pull out a box of leftovers, throwing Eagly the best bits. He deserves that tonight. 

While you’re feeding your baby, Adrian is deciding what to wear tomorrow, too eager to sleep. Maybe a patrol will tire him out. Yeah, that’ll work. While he’s killing litterbugs and decapitating jaywalkers, he’ll think of your soon to be reunion <3

ITS HERE EEEEEEE

oh my days the concept of this fic has been rolling around in my head for months and I've reworked the concept twice.

I hope u guys enjoy this one, its different from my other project but I had fun with it!

Then a third.

mostly

You typed with your thumb.

you are a public safety hazard

Roy’s reply came almost instantly.

ur awake :)

You closed your eyes and inhaled through your nose.

i am awake because you keep committing crimes against engineering

i thought u liked engineering

i like engineering when it isn’t screaming for help

sweetheart that feels like a limited worldview

You rolled onto your back and dragged the edge of your blanket up to your chin, as if warmth could protect you from Roy Harper and his apparently endless ability to find you through encrypted channels, bad hours, and your own poor decisions. You had been working with the Outlaws for eight months, which was long enough to know better and apparently not long enough to stop answering.

The arrangement had started with Red Hood breaking into your apartment at midnight, helmet tucked beneath one arm, a hard drive in his gloved hand, and a red domino still fixed over his eyes. Oracle’s word had apparently earned you a glimpse of the man beneath the mask, though not his carelessness. Your motion sensors had warned you three minutes earlier, so you did not scream; screaming at strange men with guns gave them too much satisfaction.

He had said, “Oracle said you’re good.”

You had said, “Oracle needs to stop giving my name to strange men with guns.”

“She didn’t. She said you answer to Relay.” 

You looked at the hard drive in his hand. Then at him. Then at the open window behind him.

“Is breaking and entering a Red Hood thing, or a you thing?”

His mouth twitched like he had decided not to reward that. “You want a job?”

You had nearly told him to climb back out the window. Then you had taken the drive, decrypted the first layer out of spite, and found three trafficking routes, a shell company tied to a private militia, and enough offshore transactions to make your professional curiosity stronger than your survival instincts.

After that, you became what Jason called support and what Roy called mission control. You ran comms, built surveillance patches, forged clean travel documents, tracked dirty money, scrubbed safehouse feeds, and kept their gear from betraying them at inconvenient moments. You did not go into the field. You did not wear armor. You did not jump off rooftops, exchange fire with mercenaries, or stand close enough to explosions to develop opinions about them.

You were not an Outlaw. You reminded them of this frequently.

Jason respected it because he understood boundaries when they were backed by blackmail-level system access. Koriand’r found it charming because she found many human distinctions charming, especially the ones people pretended were not emotional. Roy ignored it whenever possible.

Roy called when he had a pertinent technical question. Roy called when he had a stupid technical question. Roy called when something was sparking, smoking, blinking, ticking, leaking, or behaving in a manner he described as “ominous but kind of sexy.” Roy also called when missions went too quiet and his voice took on that careful, bright edge that told you he needed noise in his ear until his hands stopped shaking.

You knew the difference. You never said you knew.

Your phone buzzed again.

for legal reasons jay says i need to ask if this could explode

You opened the message, stared at it, and then sat up with a sigh that carried all the ruin of your sleep schedule with it. Your laptop sat on the nightstand because you had learned months ago that Roy’s emergencies were usually easier to solve from a full interface.

You accepted the secure call.

Roy had a way of saying Relay as if he had personally discovered the word and intended to make it everyone else’s problem.

“Relay,” he said into the comm, bright and shameless.

You closed your eyes. “Do not make it sound like a pet name.”

“Wasn’t planning on it.”

“You absolutely were.”

“Little bit,” he admitted. Then, before you could hang up on principle, he added, “Before you say anything, I want you to know I value your expertise.” 

“I’m hanging up.”

“See, that is the kind of decisive leadership I respect.”

“Show me the circuit board.”

His video feed came in at a terrible angle. For three seconds, you got an intimate view of his collarbone, the strap of his harness, and a smear of soot on the underside of his jaw. City lights glittered behind him, too high and too distant, which meant rooftop. Gotham, judging by the industrial gloom and the fact that Jason was audibly swearing somewhere off-screen.

“Camera,” you said.

Roy adjusted it. “Better?”

“Marginally. Why is it smoking?”

“In my defense—”

“No.”

“You didn’t hear the defense.”

“I have heard enough of your defenses to know they are usually confessions with better lighting.”

Jason’s voice cut in. “Ask her whether the thing is going to detonate.”

“I did ask,” Roy said.

“You flirted with her and then talked about legal liability.”

“That is asking.”

You pinched the bridge of your nose. “Point the camera at the board.”

Roy obeyed. Mostly. The feed lurched as he moved closer, catching a blur of rooftop gravel, Jason’s boot, and the smoking circuit board balanced on the ledge before settling crookedly over the component. Then Roy leaned in from the side, too close, and the camera caught the line of his cheek, the corner of his mouth, the smile he was failing to suppress because he knew he had woken you and had the nerve to enjoy being scolded for it.

“Roy.”

“Right. Board.”

The feed shifted. You studied the damage, your irritation fading as your brain caught on to the problem. The arrowhead was not one of Roy’s usual designs. The housing had been modified to carry a small but highly unstable cell, likely scavenged from alien tech and forced into a human-made casing by someone either ambitious or stupid. Given the Outlaws’ usual social circle, probably both.

“Do not cut the braided line,” you said.

Roy’s hand froze in frame, wire cutters visible between two fingers.

You stared.

He slowly moved the cutters away. “Wasn’t gonna.”

“You absolutely were.”

“Maybe as a thought experiment.”

Jason made a sound of disgust. “Give it to me.”

“I’ve got it.”

“Your entire life is evidence to the contrary.”

Kori’s voice floated through the line from farther away, calm and warm. “Is our friend awake?”

“She is,” Roy said.

“I am involuntarily conscious,” you corrected.

Kori sounded pleased. “Hello. I am sorry Roy has interrupted your sleeping.”

“Thank you, Kori.”

“He has been watching his phone for twenty minutes, so I believe he was hoping for an excuse.”

The rooftop went silent.

You blinked at the screen.

Jason barked a laugh.

Roy’s face came back into frame too fast. “Okay, that is wildly out of context.”

“Is it?” you asked.

“Yes.”

Kori hummed.

Jason said, “No.”

Roy pointed somewhere off-camera. “Nobody asked either of you.”

You leaned back against your pillows, suddenly much more awake than you wanted to be. “Twenty minutes?”

“I was waiting until it was necessary.”

“You were waiting for a component to smoke so you could text me?”

“Technically, the component made that decision.”

“Fascinating. I hope the two of you are happy together.”

Roy’s grin softened around the edges, just enough to make the room a little warmer than before. “Jealous?”

“You are one bad solder joint away from a memorial service.”

“You’d come?”

“I would make sure Jason disposed of your browser history.”

“That’s love.”

“That’s hazard pay.”

Jason leaned into frame, expression flat. “Are we done?”

“For now,” you said. “Disconnect the cell from the regulator, wrap it in the thermal sleeve, and stop letting Roy hold things that can alter the skyline.”

Roy placed a hand against his chest. “You wound me.”

“Clean the cut on your forehead while you’re being wounded.”

His smile froze for a second.

It was small. Barely anything. But you saw it because you had gotten too good at watching him through screens. The cut was half-hidden near his hairline, a little dark with dried blood. He had not mentioned it. He would not have mentioned it until the mission was done, and then only if it made a good joke.

“Bossy,” he said softly.

“Alive,” you replied.

For a moment, the rooftop noise faded.

Roy looked into the camera, and the usual distance of comms felt thinner than it should. “Yeah,” he said. “I’ll clean it.”

“Good.”

His mouth lifted. “You worried about me, Relay?”

You should have said no. You always said no. It was part of the rhythm. Roy leaned too close; you pushed him back with sarcasm. He tossed charm into every open channel; you swatted it away before it could land anywhere vulnerable. The system worked because both of you understood it was a game, and because neither of you had ever been stupid enough to ask what would happen if one of you stopped playing.

So you said, “I am worried about your unpaid invoices.”

“There she is,” Roy murmured.

Your stomach did something foolish.

Jason took the damaged arrow out of Roy’s hand and moved out of frame. “I liked her better before you started flirting.”

“You hired me,” you said.

“One of my few regrets.”

Kori said, “I enjoy this. It is like watching a small battle, but affectionate.”

“It is not affectionate,” you and Jason said at the same time.

Roy, traitor that he was, only smiled.

You ended the call before he could see you smiling back.

By noon the next day, Jason had ruined your week.

He arrived through the door this time, which meant either he wanted something difficult or he had finally learned from the countermeasures you had installed on your windows after his first visit. Roy came in behind him, carrying a cardboard tray with four coffees and the expression of a man who knew he was about to enjoy himself. Kori entered last, ducking slightly under the doorframe of your apartment with easy grace, a bright smile, and a paper bag.

“I bought pastries,” she announced.

You pointed at her. “You may stay.”

Roy held up the coffee. “I brought caffeine.”

“You may plead your case.”

Jason set a matte-black case on your worktable. “We have a job.”

“You always have a job.”

“You’re going on this one.”

You looked at him.

Jason looked back.

Roy took one careful step away from your desk, proving he had some survival instincts after all.

“No,” you said.

“You haven’t heard the job.”

“I heard enough. You used the phrase going on this one, which is the wrong phrase to use with someone who works from a chair for several excellent reasons.”

“You’re the only one who can do it.”

“That is often true and rarely requires me to leave my apartment.”

Jason opened the case.

Inside, secured beneath layers of anti-static film and dampening mesh, was a shard of metal about the length of your thumb. Metal was the simplest word for it, though you knew as soon as you looked at it that it was not quite right. The surface shifted from silver to green to a color that slipped away when you tried to focus on it. Fine lines ran through it in repeating geometric curves, too deliberate to be damage and too organic to be standard circuitry.

Your irritation thinned despite yourself.

“What is that?”

“A piece of the problem,” Jason said.

Roy leaned his hip against the edge of your table. “A sexy piece of the problem.”

“Do not flirt with the alien shrapnel.”

“I was flirting with the expert.”

“Also ill-advised.”

Kori’s expression had gone serious. “It is old.”

You glanced at her. “You recognize it?”

“Not fully. I recognize the shape of its energy, but it has been changed. Perhaps Tamaranean. Perhaps Psion. Perhaps both.”

That got your attention. “Both sounds bad.”

“It often is,” Kori said.

Jason tapped the lid of the case. “This shard broke off the main artifact during transport. A private collector named Lucian Crowe bought the larger piece and locked it under his estate near Marseille. The vault is air-gapped, shielded, and running a hybrid system none of our gear can read from the outside.”

You looked at the shard again. The lines along its surface seemed to pulse.

“Crowe has alien tech in a private vault,” you said slowly, “and you want to steal it.”

“Recover it.”

“Steal it before the man who stole it can keep it. I understand branding, Jason.”

Roy grinned. “Crime with ethics.”

“Do not help.”

“I think I helped a little.”

“You did not.”

Jason crossed his arms. “The vault has no wireless access. Drones die within thirty feet of the lower level. The main artifact is tied into the internal security system, and if we pull it wrong, we don’t know what it triggers.”

You closed your eyes.

Roy said, “She’s doing the thing.”

“What thing?” Jason asked.

“The thing where she’s already solving it and hating us for being right.”

“I am hating you for several reasons,” you said.

“But one of them is because I’m right.”

“Do not make me regret saving your face from microfusion shrapnel.”

Kori stepped closer, her voice gentler than the others’. “We would not ask if there were another way. You will not be there to fight. You will be there to understand the machine.”

“I understand machines from behind walls and heavily encrypted distance.”

“The distance is the problem,” Jason said. “We need hands on the system.”

You looked at Roy before you meant to. He had gone quieter. The humor was still there because Roy rarely abandoned a shield while conscious, but it had settled into something less bright. He was watching you with open concern, and that was worse than if he had made another joke. Roy could tease you into doing almost anything because you could tease back. This felt like care, and care made you stupid.

“I’m not a vigilante,” you said.

“We know,” Jason replied.

“I don’t do fieldwork.”

“We know.”

“I am extremely attached to being unshot.”

Roy lifted a hand. “For what it’s worth, I am also attached to you being unshot.”

You stared at him.

His mouth twitched. “That sounded smoother in my head.”

“Did it?”

“No, actually. I panicked halfway through.”

You should not have laughed. Unfortunately, you did.

Jason looked between you with the exhausted resignation of a man who had been trapped in an elevator with jazz. “Roy stays with you the whole time. Kori and I handle security. You get in, interface with the vault, disconnect the artifact, and get out.”

You studied the shard. The sensible answer remained no. It sat in your mouth, clean and ready. Then the lines along the metal flared in response to some unknown input, and your nearest monitor flickered.

Your curiosity stirred.

Roy saw it happen. You knew because his face changed.

“Don’t,” you warned.

“I didn’t say anything.”

“You looked smug.”

“I have a naturally smug resting face.”

“You have a naturally punchable resting face.”

“See?” Kori said warmly. “Affectionate battle.”

Jason groaned.

You rubbed a hand over your face. “I want hazard pay.”

Jason nodded. “Done.”

“And I call retreat if I think the system is unstable.”

“Done.”

“And Roy does not touch anything unless I specifically tell him to touch it.”

Roy put the coffee down and raised both hands. “I will be your humble assistant.”

“That sentence has never once described you.”

“I said will be. Personal growth.”

You held his gaze longer than you should have. “I mean it. If I’m on the ground, you listen.”

Roy’s smile softened again, the joking surface giving way to something steadier beneath. “I’ll listen.”

You hated that you believed him.

The estate outside Marseille looked like every criminal billionaire’s idea of subtlety: pale stone walls, manicured cypress, glass balconies, an infinity pool overlooking the sea, and enough concealed security to make the entire cliffside hum with money and paranoia. From the outside, it could have been a vacation home. Through your tablet, it looked like a migraine.

You crouched behind a maintenance structure near the eastern edge of the property, wearing body armor Jason had produced far too quickly and an earpiece you had modified yourself because you trusted your own encryption more than his. The Mediterranean stretched dark and quiet beyond the cliffs. The night smelled like salt, stone, and expensive flowers.

You missed your chair. You missed your monitors. You missed the ability to glare at danger through a screen while wearing pajama pants.

Roy crouched beside you, bow in hand, wearing the serene expression of a man who thought breaking into fortified estates was a reasonable way to spend an evening. He glanced over when you shifted the tablet against your knee.

“You okay?”

“I am reconsidering several life choices.”

“That’s normal.”

“For you.”

“Usually I wait until after the explosion.”

“You are bad at comfort.”

“I can try flirting.”

“I will push you into the ocean.”

He smiled, but his eyes stayed on the perimeter lights. “You’d have to get through my reflexes.”

“I have disabled three of your comm units remotely.”

“Those were innocent.”

“Those were playing music during a stealth op.”

“They were boosting morale.”

“They were playing ABBA.”

“Exactly.”

Jason’s voice cut in through comms. “If you two are done.”

“You are no fun on heists,” Roy said.

“It’s not a heist.”

“It is absolutely a heist,” you said.

Jason ignored you both. “Patrol’s coming around west. Kori, you’re up.”

Above you, Kori crossed the sky like a silent flare, too fast and high for the guards to register before their feed died. Your tablet showed two camera grids that froze, looped, and resumed with edited footage. You tapped three commands into the overlay and opened a six-minute window through the outer perimeter.

“East path is blind,” you said. “Thermal sweep is on a delay. Two guards by the service entrance, one drone on the south balcony. Kori has twelve seconds to make that drone regret existing.”

“I will be swift,” Kori said.

The drone vanished from your feed.

Roy whispered, “I love watching her work.”

“I love when people complete tasks without arguing.”

“That feels pointed.”

“It is.”

He touched your elbow lightly. You looked at his hand before you looked at him. The contact was brief, barely more than a check-in. It should not have steadied you as much as it did.

“Stay behind me once we’re inside,” he said.

“I thought you were my humble assistant.”

“I can be humble in front.”

“That is not how hierarchy works.”

“I’m reinventing it.”

You rolled your eyes, but your pulse had slowed. Roy noticed. His hand fell away before it could become something either of you had to address.

Jason dropped the two guards by the service entrance with the efficiency of a man who had decided the night would go better if no one got to finish a sentence. The door opened on your command, and the four of you slipped inside.

The first floor smelled like polished wood and cold air. Crowe had filled the place with art, or what people with more money than taste considered art: stolen statues, framed weapons, antique maps, fragments of things that belonged in museums and were instead arranged under perfect lighting for one man’s private enjoyment. You kept your attention on your tablet. Objects were easier to pity when you were not trying to stay alive.

The house systems were easy compared to the vault. Too easy, which annoyed you. Crowe had spent millions on hardware and then let human arrogance make the architecture predictable. You looped feeds, delayed door alarms, and walked Jason through a rotating pressure sensor in the hall outside the private elevator.

Roy stayed close. Too close, sometimes. His shoulder nearly brushed yours when you stopped beside a panel. His breath warmed the side of your neck when he leaned in to look at your screen. Once, while you were bypassing a biometric lock, his hand came to rest on the wall beside your head as he watched the corridor behind you. It put him around you without touching. Protective, but not crowding.

You hated how aware you were of him.

“You’re staring at the wrong thing,” you murmured.

Roy’s eyes flicked down. “I’m watching the hall.”

“You were watching my hands.”

“Your hands are doing cool things.”

“My hands are working.”

“That is one of the cool things.”

The lock clicked open.

You refused to look at him as you stepped through. “Your field professionalism is overwhelming.”

“Thank you. I’ve been practicing.”

Jason, several yards ahead, said, “You haven’t.”

“I’ve been thinking about practicing.”

“That’s different.”

“It’s adjacent.”

The private elevator took you below the estate, deep enough that your tablet lost the house network and switched to local mapping. The lower level had been carved into the cliff and reinforced with composite paneling. The air turned colder. The lighting became harsh and clean. Wealth disappeared, replaced by sterile function. You saw lab rooms through narrow windows as you passed. Containment chambers. Scanning equipment. Storage cases. A surgical table with restraints attached.

Your stomach tightened.

Roy noticed immediately. “Hey.”

“I’m fine.”

His voice lowered. “I know you are. Still.”

You glanced at him and found no joke waiting. He had seen the table too. He knew what kind of people used restraints in private labs beneath their homes. The anger in his expression was quiet and sharp.

Jason stopped at the end of the hall. “Vault.”

The door was circular, seamless, and embedded in the wall with no visible handle. A single access port sat beneath a shielded cover at waist height. The readings on your scanner went strange as soon as you lifted it, numbers bending into nonsense before snapping back.

Kori stood very still.

You looked at her. “Bad?”

“Old,” she said again. “And hurt.”

It was not the kind of thing you wanted to hear about alien technology.

Jason glanced at you. “Can you open it?”

“Probably.”

“Comforting.”

“You want honest or comforting?”

He said nothing.

“That’s what I thought.”

You settled in front of the access port and pulled your kit from your bag. Roy crouched beside you, bow resting across his knees, his body angled toward the corridor while his attention kept flicking back to you.

“Don’t hover,” you said.

“I’m guarding.”

“You are hovering with weapons.”

“Very different.”

You plugged into the port. Your tablet flashed white, then black, then filled with symbols that were not part of any language pack you had installed. The translation patch you had built from the shard’s resonance data stuttered, corrected itself, and began offering rough approximations.

Resonance lock. Neurological key. Containment field. Memory lattice.

You frowned.

Roy heard it in your silence. “What kind of frown is that?”

“The bad kind.”

“I know several bad kinds.”

“The system isn’t just locked by code. It’s reading the room.”

Jason’s hand tightened around his gun. “Reading how?”

“Heat. Electrical output. Brain activity, maybe.” You tapped deeper into the system, watching the symbols reorder themselves. “It’s tied into the artifact. Crowe didn’t build a vault around it. He built the vault through it.”

“That sounds unstable,” Roy said.

“That is because you have pattern recognition.”

“I’m choosing to take that as a compliment.”

“It almost was.”

Kori moved closer to the vault door. “Can it be opened without harm?”

“I think so,” you said, which was the most dangerous kind of answer. “I need quiet.”

For once, you got it.

Your world narrowed to the interface. The system resisted blunt commands, so you stopped giving them. You followed its rhythm instead, tracing the places where Crowe’s human security had been forced around something older and stranger. The vault was listening. You disliked the word, but it was the right one. It listened for patterns, for intent, for emotional pressure. It had been designed for something delicate before Crowe turned it into a lock.

You found the seam.

The door opened with a low mechanical groan. Cold air spilled over the threshold. The chamber beyond was round and dark, lit from below by thin white lines in the floor. At the center stood a pedestal. Suspended above it, inside a transparent containment field, was the artifact.

It looked like two interlocked rings around a shard of living light. Metal, crystal, and energy moved together in a slow rotation, too elegant to be weaponry and too precise to be decoration. It gave off no heat on your scanner, but your skin prickled as if you had stepped too close to lightning.

Roy let out a low whistle. “Okay. That is sexy alien tech.”

“Do not flirt with the artifact either.”

“I’m appreciating craftsmanship.”

“It can probably hear you.”

He leaned away slightly. “Then I respect its boundaries.”

Jason entered first, gun raised. Kori followed, eyes fixed on the spinning rings. You stayed near the access port, still connected to the vault system, and began mapping the containment field.

The deeper you went, the less you liked it.

“This was altered,” you said. “Badly.”

Kori nodded. “The Psions did this.”

You glanced up. “You’re sure?”

“I know the cruelty of their work.”

There was a weight in her voice that made Roy’s expression darken and Jason’s mouth flatten. You looked back down, suddenly aware that this was not merely a dangerous machine. It was history in pieces, stolen, modified, sold, locked away under a rich man’s house.

You hated Crowe with surprising clarity.

“What was it originally?” you asked.

“I do not know,” Kori said. “Perhaps a healing instrument. Perhaps a ceremonial bond. Something meant for trust.”

Roy shifted. “And Crowe wired it to his alarm system.”

“Men like Crowe think trust is something they can buy a cage for,” Jason said.

The vault hummed.

Your tablet vibrated against your palm.

You looked down. “That wasn’t me.”

The floor lights shifted from white to amber. The artifact’s rings turned faster, drawing light inward until the center went dark. New symbols spilled across your screen faster than your patch could translate.

Roy stood. “Talk to us, Relay.”

“Secondary command just woke up.”

“Can you stop it?”

“I can if everyone stops asking me questions.”

Jason moved to the vault door. “We have guards coming.”

“Of course we have guards coming.”

Kori lifted off the ground, energy gathering around her hands. “Can I destroy the pedestal?”

“No,” you snapped. “If you hit it while the containment field is inverting, the feedback could—”

The vault door slammed shut. The sound punched through the chamber like a verdict.

For a second, nobody moved.

Then Jason was at the door, knife in hand, tearing into the manual panel. “Open it.”

“I’m trying.”

Roy came to your side. “What do you need?”

You shoved the scanner at him. “Aim this at the artifact and keep it steady. Do not touch anything else.”

His face changed at your tone. All humor gone. “Got it.”

He moved into position.

You cut into the secondary command. The system fought back like a living thing. Crowe had built a trap beneath the trap: if anyone tried to deactivate the field, the artifact would activate instead, using the neurological signatures in the room as a trigger. You saw it one second before the system committed.

“Oh,” you said.

Roy looked over. “Oh good or oh bad?”

“Everyone down.”

The artifact opened. Light tore through the vault.

Roy moved first. He dropped the scanner and lunged for you, one arm catching around your waist as he hauled you backward from the interface. Your tablet hit the floor. His body turned around yours, bracketing you against the nearest console, one hand cradling the back of your head as the room went white.

For one impossible moment, you felt everything. Kori was a star in human shape, fear and anger blazing together with a grief so old it felt like deep space. Jason was a locked door with a burning room behind it, every instinct sharpened toward getting all of you out alive. Beneath them both, the artifact reached through the chamber with desperate, broken purpose, searching for a pattern it recognized.

Then Roy eclipsed all of it. His fear hit you like impact. Your name. Your body under his. His arms locked around you. The violent certainty that the blast would hit him first because he had chosen to be there. Beneath that, a rush of things you were never supposed to feel: affection buried under jokes, wanting buried under habit, the old ache of being too much and never enough, the terror of losing something before he had ever admitted he wanted to keep it.

The light went through him. Then through you.

The world snapped apart.

You came back to the sound of Roy saying your name. At least, you thought he was saying it. The comms were static. Your ears rang. Your cheek was pressed against his chest, and his hand was still cupped around your head. The vault strobed red around you. Somewhere nearby, Jason was cursing at the door.

“Hey,” Roy said. “Come on. Look at me.”

You opened your eyes. His face hovered above yours, too close and too frightened. Blood tracked from a shallow cut near his temple. His hair was mussed, his shoulder smoking where the blast had burned through the outer layer of his jacket.

“You’re very dramatic,” you managed.

Relief flooded you so hard you gasped.

It was not yours.

Roy laughed once, shaky and breathless, and then went still because he felt you feel it.

Your eyes met.

“Oh,” you whispered.

The vault door shrieked open behind you.

Jason stepped through the gap with his helmet on, guns drawn. “Move.”

Guards shouted from the corridor. Kori flew past him in a streak of light, and the next several seconds became chaos.

Roy got you upright. The moment his hand left your waist, pain stabbed behind your eyes so sharply your knees buckled. He caught you again, and the pain eased.

Both of you froze.

Jason fired into the corridor. “This is a bad time for whatever that is.”

“Agreed,” you said, grabbing Roy’s hand.

His fingers closed around yours. Relief moved through the contact, warm and immediate, and you hated that you could not tell which one of you felt it first.

The escape came in pieces.

You remembered Roy keeping one hand on you as the four of you fought your way out of the lower level. You remembered Jason taking point with ruthless efficiency. You remembered Kori’s light burning through smoke. You remembered trying to pull up the estate schematic and seeing the lines swim on your screen whenever Roy moved more than a few feet away.

Worse than the pain was the noise.

Roy was in your head, though not exactly in words. He came through as pressure, heat, flashes of thought sharpened by emotion. His shoulder hurt. His ribs ached. He was angry at himself in a way that made your throat tighten. Should’ve pulled her sooner. Should’ve said no. Should’ve kept her out of this. Stupid. Stupid. Stupid.

“Stop,” you snapped as the group reached the service corridor.

Roy looked at you. “What?”

“Thinking so loudly.”

His eyes widened.

Jason did not turn around. “Do I want to know?”

“No,” you and Roy said together.

That would have been funny if the west stairwell had not exploded.

By the time you reached the van, your hands were shaking badly enough that Roy had to help you inside. He climbed in after you, and you hated the way your body leaned toward him as soon as he sat. Kori got behind the wheel. Jason slammed the back doors shut and pounded the side panel twice. The van tore away from the estate with the kind of speed that suggested Kori had learned to drive from someone who believed roads were merely polite suggestions.

Roy sat beside you, close but not touching. The space between you throbbed.

You clenched your teeth.

He noticed instantly. “Can I?”

He held out his hand.

That was the thing that almost broke you. He was in pain too. You could feel the echo of it. He was worried, confused, and strung tight with adrenaline, but he still asked before touching you.

You nodded.

His hand closed around yours.

The relief was so intense you had to shut your eyes.

Jason turned in the passenger seat. “Explain.”

“The artifact was tied into neurological response,” you said, forcing the words through the haze. “The blast created some kind of feedback loop.”

“That is not an explanation.”

“It’s the only one I have while trying not to vomit.”

Kori glanced at you through the rearview mirror. Her expression softened. “You are bonded.”

Jason’s helmet turned toward her. “Bonded.”

“In feeling. Perhaps in sensation. It may be temporary.”

“May be?”

“The technology was damaged,” Kori said. “And altered. I will need to examine the shard.”

You opened your eyes. “What shard?”

Jason was quiet for half a second too long.

You stared. “Jason.”

He reached into his jacket and withdrew the black case.

“You brought unstable alien tech into the van with the people it just scrambled?”

“I wasn’t leaving it for Crowe.”

“You could have mentioned it.”

“We were being shot at.”

Roy’s thumb moved across the back of your hand, small and unconscious. It steadied you before you could resent it. Then his worry spiked when he realized he had done it.

You turned to him. “Do not apologize.”

“I didn’t.”

“You were about to.”

He looked uncomfortable. “This is going to get weird fast.”

“It already got weird. You’re late.”

Kori pulled onto a dark service road, leaving the estate lights far behind. “Touch will help. Distance may worsen the symptoms until the bond settles.”

Jason leaned back in his seat and said nothing for a long moment.

Then he said, “Of course touch helps.”

The safehouse was ugly, practical, and aggressively Jason.

It sat on the edge of an industrial stretch outside the city, surrounded by shuttered garages and storage units. Inside, it had two bedrooms, one bathroom, a kitchen stocked with protein bars and instant coffee, a weapons table, a medical cabinet, and furniture that looked as though Jason had collected it from various places where people had died. It was clean, secure, and devoid of any object chosen for joy.

“You live like a haunted landlord,” you said as Roy helped you through the door.

Jason removed his helmet. “You’re welcome.”

“I did not say thank you.”

“You were about to.”

“I was not.”

Roy’s hand was warm around yours. “She wasn’t.”

Jason looked at him. “You stay out of this.”

“I’m literally attached to this.”

“Temporarily,” you said.

Roy glanced at you, and the flicker of hurt crossed the bond before he could bury it.

Your chest tightened.

You had not meant it like that. Or maybe you had, because the alternative was admitting that something in you had already started to worry about what would happen when it was over.

Jason did triage in the living room. He checked your pupils, cleaned the cut at your temple, asked questions about dizziness and memory, and kept his expression carefully neutral as you and Roy sat shoulder to shoulder on the couch because anything more than a foot of distance made both of you nauseous. When Jason cleaned the burn across Roy’s shoulder, the sting echoed across your own skin.

You flinched.

Roy turned immediately. “You felt that?”

“Yes.”

His guilt rolled through you, hot and awful.

“Stop,” you said.

“I didn’t say anything.”

“You felt guilty.”

Jason paused with the gauze in hand. “You can feel that?”

“Apparently.”

Roy looked down. “Great.”

You touched his knee before thinking. “I’m fine.”

He went still.

The contact was nothing. Barely anything compared to holding hands, compared to his body over yours in the vault. But the emotion that moved through him in response was enormous. Relief. Desire. Care. All of it slamming into restraint so quickly it almost hurt.

You pulled your hand back.

The headache returned at once.

Roy caught your wrist, not hard, just enough to maintain contact. “Sorry.”

You glared at him. “What did I say?”

“Right. No apologizing for involuntary alien-bond nonsense.”

“Or for wanting things.”

His eyes snapped to yours.

The silence that followed was a problem.

Jason stood. “I’m getting Kori.”

“Coward,” you said.

“Yes,” he replied, and left.

Roy stared at the coffee table like it might offer legal counsel. “For the record, I am trying very hard not to make this your problem.”

“You are doing a terrible job.”

His mouth twitched. “Yeah?”

“You are anxious directly into my brain.”

“That sounds unhealthy.”

“It is.”

He leaned back against the couch, wincing when his shoulder touched the cushion. You felt the pain and turned without thinking.

“Shoulder.”

“I’m fine.”

“You are a liar.”

“You knew that before the bond.”

“Yes, but now I have receipts.”

That startled a laugh out of him. You felt the way it loosened something in his chest, and that was worse than the desire. Desire was easy to categorize, even when inconvenient. Roy’s happiness at making you laugh was soft. Too soft. It slipped under your defenses before you could lock them.

Kori returned with Jason and the shard. She had wrapped it in a square of gold fabric that shimmered strangely under the safehouse lights.

“I spoke briefly with someone who may know more,” she said. “The full answer will take time, but I believe the device was not made to harm. It was a bonding instrument once, perhaps used for healing or shared pain. The Psions damaged it. Crowe made the damage worse.”

You looked at the covered shard on the table. “Of course he did.”

“Can you reverse it?” Jason asked.

“Not safely yet. The bond was formed under distress. It must settle before I can separate them without causing more harm.”

“How long?” Roy asked.

“Hours. Perhaps days.”

Jason’s jaw tightened. “And until then?”

“Proximity,” Kori said. “Touch, when needed. Calm will help.”

Jason looked at your joined hands.

Roy looked at the ceiling.

You said, “Do not.”

“I didn’t say anything,” Jason replied.

“You thought something judgmental.”

“I always think something judgmental.”

Kori sat across from you, expression kind. “The bond does not create what is absent. It reveals and amplifies what is already present.”

The room went still.

Roy’s hand tightened around yours for half a second before he forced it to relax.

Jason closed his eyes.

You looked at Kori. “Is that medically relevant?”

“Yes.”

“Is there a less devastating way to say it?”

She considered. “The machine cannot invent desire, only conduct it.”

“That was worse.”

Roy made a choking sound.

Jason turned toward the kitchen. “I’m leaving before this becomes my problem.”

“It is your safehouse,” you said.

“Then I’m leaving the problem in a room I’m not in.”

Kori watched him go with fond patience. “He is uncomfortable with tender complications.”

Roy’s voice was dry. “Jason? No.”

You tried to laugh, but the movement made your headache worse. Roy noticed, because of course he did.

“Rest,” he said.

You looked at him. “Do not start giving me orders.”

“That was a suggestion.”

“It had tone.”

“My tone is concerned.”

“Your concern is bossy.”

“I’m learning so much about myself tonight.”

Kori smiled. “Rest would help. The bond will be easier to understand if your bodies are not fighting injury and fear.”

You wanted to argue. You also wanted to lie down before your skull split open. Unfortunately, standing without Roy touching you remained a bad idea. The second your hands separated, pain flashed through both of you. He caught your hand again, breathing through his teeth.

“Okay,” he said. “Hands remain.”

Jason’s voice came from the kitchen. “One bedroom has a queen bed. The other has two twins. Kori and I are taking the twins.”

Your entire body went hot. “Excuse me?”

He reappeared with a glass of water and an expression that dared anyone to make him explain further. “You two need touch, or you get migraines. I need at least three hours of sleep before Crowe sends people after us. Kori needs space to figure out the alien soul Velcro. Adults can share a bed without making it weird.”

Roy’s emotions jumped so violently that you almost winced.

Jason pointed at him. “Especially you.”

“I didn’t say anything.”

“You breathed like an idiot.”

“You heard him breathe?” you asked.

“I heard the intent.”

Kori nodded. “The intent was loud.”

Roy looked betrayed. “I am being persecuted.”

“You are being accommodated,” Jason said. “Try gratitude.”

“I can take the floor,” Roy said quickly.

You turned toward him.

His face was open enough that you forgot your retort. Beneath the humor was the same fear as before: that you would think he wanted the situation, that his wanting made him unsafe, that needing touch because of the bond would make you feel trapped with him.

It was exhausting, realizing how careful Roy was underneath all that recklessness.

It was also inconveniently attractive.

“The floor makes no sense,” you said.

He blinked. “What?”

“The chair makes no sense either. The couch barely fits Jason’s emotional repression, let alone a human body. We can share the bed.”

Roy stared.

“You are going to be normal about it,” you added.

“Absolutely.”

“You are already being weird.”

“I’m being extremely normal in my head.”

“You are not.”

His mouth opened, then closed. “That is unfair.”

“Yes.”

Jason set the water on the table. “Great. Settled.”

“I hate this family meeting,” you said.

“We’re not a family,” Jason said.

Kori smiled. “We are an unconventional support structure.”

“That is worse,” Jason said.

The bedroom was small, plain, and lit by a single lamp with a crooked shade. The bed took up most of the floor space. There was a dresser, a chair, blackout curtains, and no evidence of anyone having ever enjoyed being alive in that room. Jason’s safehouse aesthetic seemed to have been developed by asking a bunker what it feared most.

Changing became a negotiation conducted with military seriousness and no eye contact. Jason had grabbed your emergency bag from the van, which meant you had backup hardware, chargers, field tools, and three different ways to bypass a locked server. What you did not have was clothes, because you had not packed for whatever fresh hell this was. Roy had a spare shirt in his bag, soft from use and big enough that you could pretend it solved more problems than it did.

You changed first, with Roy standing with his back to you and one hand held awkwardly behind him so you could keep two fingers hooked through his. Each brief loss of contact sent pressure blooming behind your eyes before you found his hand again. Fabric dragged. Armor came off in stages. Your dignity followed shortly after. There was no underwear in your bag, and the thought of putting borrowed sweatpants over nothing felt somehow worse than wearing only Roy’s shirt, which at least fell low enough to cover what it needed to cover if you did not move too carelessly.

By the time you looked down at yourself, drowned in Roy Harper’s shirt and partially empathically bonded to him, you had given up on preparing for sharing a bed.

There was no preparation for that.

Then it was his turn, which was somehow worse. You faced the blackout curtains with the focus of someone defusing a bomb while Roy changed behind you, his fingers still loosely linked with yours. A buckle hit the floor. Fabric shifted. Roy swore under his breath when his injured shoulder pulled, and you felt the brief flash of pain through the bond before he could hide it.

“Shoulder,” you said.

“I’m fine.”

“You are very bad at lying for someone who does it professionally.”

“I’m wounded.”

“Yes, that is my point.”

A soft laugh left him, followed by another rustle of fabric. “You know, if you’re going to feel every time you want to look, turning around might be the more honest option.”

You stared harder at the curtains. “I am practicing restraint.”

“Hot.”

“Roy.”

“What? It is.”

“You are making this worse.”

“I am standing half-dressed in a safehouse bedroom while psychically handcuffed. Worse was already here.”

By the time he sat beside you again, Roy was in sweatpants and a clean shirt, his damaged shoulder bandaged beneath the fabric. He had not showered. Neither of you had. There was still a faint smear of soot near his jaw and dried blood near his hairline, but the clean clothes made him look softer in a way you had not prepared for.

He looked at you.

Then he looked at the hem of his shirt, which had fallen low enough to cover you when you were standing still, but now that you were sitting, rode just high enough to make it impossible for either of you to forget what you were not wearing beneath it.

Heat pulsed through the bond.

“Subtle.”

He closed his eyes. “I am trying so hard.”

“I can tell. That makes it funnier.”

“It makes it worse from where I’m sitting.”

“You could stop staring.”

“I did stop staring.”

“After getting caught.”

“I am only human.”

“You are mostly nuisance.”

“Mostly,” he agreed, and his smile was tired but real. Then, after a beat, “For the record, I am aware this is a practical clothing issue.”

“That sounds almost mature.”

“I said almost.”

“You were doing so well.”

“I’m doing heroic work internally,” he said. “You have no idea.”

“Unfortunately, I have some idea.”

The old rhythm helped. You got into bed before you could overthink it, choosing the side closest to the wall because you had tactical instincts and also because it gave you something to do. Roy waited until you settled, then lay down beside you with stiff care, leaving an absurd gap between your bodies.

The gap lasted less than five seconds.

Pain bloomed behind your eyes, slow and sharp. Roy hissed softly beside you.

“This is stupid,” you said.

“I support that assessment.”

“Hand.”

He reached for you under the blanket. Your fingers slid together. The pain eased, though not fully.

Roy looked at the ceiling. “Better?”

“Somewhat.”

“That sounds like a no.”

“It is a partial no.”

“Can I move closer?”

The question was so careful that something in your chest ached.

“Yes.”

He shifted toward you. His shoulder brushed yours. Relief moved through the bond, warm and immediate, followed by awareness. His body close to yours. The hem of his shirt riding high against your thigh. The sound of your breathing in the quiet room. The fact that the two of you were alone now, with Jason and Kori beyond the wall and a bond humming between you like a live wire.

Roy went rigid.

“Breathe,” you said.

He let out a laugh that barely qualified as one. “Working on it.”

“You are panicking.”

“I am in a bed with the woman I’ve been flirting with for eight months while alien tech broadcasts my inside thoughts. I feel like a little panic is fair.”

Your heart gave a stupid little turn.

“The woman you’ve been flirting with?” you asked.

He froze.

You turned your head on the pillow. He was close enough that you could see the uncertainty cross his face, the way he wanted to make a joke and could not quite reach for one fast enough.

“Yeah,” he said finally. “That woman.”

You should have deflected. You were good at deflecting. You had built entire relationships out of deflection, made yourself useful enough to be kept around and sharp enough not to be handled carelessly. With Roy, deflection had always been easy because he was doing it too. Both of you tossed sparks across distance, trusting neither would let the fire catch.

The bond made silence honest.

“I flirted back,” you said.

His breath caught.

You felt that too.

“Yeah?” he asked.

“You cannot possibly be surprised.”

“I’m trying to decide how much of that was real and how much was you keeping me from electrocuting myself.”

“Those can overlap.”

His smile flickered. “Kori would be thrilled to hear you say that.”

“Do not tell Kori anything.”

“She already knows everything.”

“She suspects everything. That is different.”

Roy rolled slightly onto his side, careful with his shoulder, facing you fully now. His hand remained in yours beneath the blanket. “What do you suspect?”

It was the wrong question to ask softly.

You looked at him, at the face you had watched through glitching cameras and rooftop feeds, at the mouth that could make anything sound like a joke until the joke broke and something sincere slipped out. Roy was reckless, yes. Brilliant. Charming. A walking hazard label with a bow and unresolved emotional baggage. He was also kinder than he pretended, more careful than he wanted credit for, and lonelier than most people noticed.

You suspected you were already in trouble.

“I suspect,” you said, “that you call me when things are broken because it gives you an excuse.”

Roy’s expression changed. “Sometimes.”

“I suspect sometimes the broken thing is you.”

His jaw tightened.

You almost regretted saying it, except the bond carried his answer before pride could: yes.

You squeezed his hand. “I don’t mind.”

He looked away. “You should.”

“That is not your decision.”

“Maybe not. But I know what it’s like to be somebody’s bad habit.”

The words landed gently, which made them hurt more.

You knew pieces of Roy’s past because files existed, because Jason had warned you without giving details, and because Roy had mentioned recovery once in a voice that dared you to make it a subject. You knew enough to understand that wanting had not always been safe for him. Need had been complicated. Comfort had been complicated. Shame had teeth, and sometimes Roy smiled like a man keeping them from closing.

You turned onto your side, keeping hold of his hand. “You are not my bad habit.”

His mouth moved like he wanted to argue.

You lifted your eyebrows. “Do you want to fight with the woman currently inside your emotional blast radius?”

That startled a laugh out of him. The bond warmed.

“You’re terrifying,” he said.

“You like that.”

“I really do.”

The words were immediate. Too immediate to hide behind.

You both went quiet.

Desire moved then, slower than before. It did not crash through the bond the way panic had. It spread, intimate and heavy. Roy’s gaze flicked to your mouth, then back up. Your own body responded before you could pretend otherwise. The bond caught that too.

Roy inhaled carefully. “We should sleep.”

“You don’t want to sleep.”

“I am making a noble suggestion.”

“It is a bad suggestion.”

“It is probably the only smart one I’ve had all night.”

“Do you want to stop?” you asked.

His eyes closed briefly. “No.”

“Then stop trying to decide for both of us.”

He opened his eyes. “I am trying to be decent.”

“You are being decent. You asked. I answered.”

“That easy?”

“No. But it can be that clear.”

Roy stared at you for a long moment, and whatever he saw in your face must have reached something the bond could not, because his restraint shifted. It did not vanish. It changed shape, making room for want instead of trying to bury it.

“Can I kiss you?” he asked.

“Yes.”

The first kiss was careful.

That surprised you, though perhaps it should not have. Roy did many things quickly, but he kissed you as if he had spent months imagining it and still did not trust the moment not to break under his hands. His mouth touched yours softly, once, then again, and his fingers tightened around yours beneath the blanket.

The bond lit.

It was overwhelming, but not unpleasant. His nerves and yours braided at the edges, doubling sensation until the slide of his lips over yours felt like both giving and receiving. You felt his pulse jump when your free hand touched his jaw. You felt your own pleasure echoed back by the low sound he made when you kissed him harder.

Roy pulled back first, breath uneven. “Okay?”

You blinked at him. “That is an absurd question.”

“I’m going to need more than that.”

You kissed him again.

He accepted that answer with enthusiasm.

The second kiss was less careful. Roy’s hand slid to your waist, warm through your shirt, then stopped there until you shifted closer. The permission broke something loose in him. He drew you in, still mindful of his shoulder, mouth opening under yours with a hunger that made the bond flare hot.

You had expected him to be good with his mouth because Roy was good with it in every way that had annoyed you for months: talking his way past locked doors, flirting over comms while bullets flew, distracting armed men with sheer offensive charm, and making you laugh when you were trying very hard to stay mad at him. Expectation did not help. He kissed like he listened, and that was devastating. Every small sound you made changed him. Every reaction taught him something. His hand moved at your waist, thumb stroking once beneath the hem of your shirt when it rode up.

Skin touched skin.

Both of you gasped.

Roy went still. “Too much?”

“No.” You heard your own voice and barely recognized it. “Again.”

His eyes darkened.

He touched you again, this time deliberately, palm sliding beneath your shirt to settle against your side. The bond carried his reaction with humiliating clarity. Heat. Desire. Awe so intense it nearly embarrassed you. He was not only touching you. He was stunned that he was allowed.

You caught his wrist and guided his hand higher.

Roy exhaled shakily. “Sweetheart.”

The word had always been a weapon in his mouth. Playful. Teasing. Designed to make you threaten him. This time, it sounded wrecked.

You kissed him before he could see what that did to you.

Things moved slowly after that, though not because either of you lacked interest. The bond made rushing impossible. Every sensation needed room. Roy’s hand on your skin, your fingers in his hair, his mouth at your throat, the flex of his stomach beneath your palm when your hand slipped under his shirt. Everything reflected. Everything deepened. If either of you moved too quickly, pleasure sharpened toward something almost painful.

Roy learned the rhythm faster than you expected, and then you remembered that he was always learning. That was part of the problem with him. People saw the jokes first. They saw the reckless grin, the bad impulse control, the quiver full of impossible arrows, and they missed the mind underneath. Roy paid attention. He adapted. He learned where pressure became too much and where you wanted more.

You pushed his shirt up, and he sat back enough to pull it over his head with a wince.

Your hands caught his before he could hide it. “Shoulder.”

“It’s fine.”

“You are incapable of telling the truth about injuries.”

“I tell the truth about injuries all the time. Usually through humor.”

“That does not count.”

“It counts a little.”

You touched the edge of the bandage. The burn was ugly but clean, crossing the upper slope of his shoulder where the blast had hit him first. Your throat tightened.

Roy felt it.

“Hey,” he said softly. “Don’t.”

“You got hurt because of me.”

“I got hurt because Crowe is an asshole with a haunted space artifact.”

“Roy.”

“I pulled you back because I wanted to. I’d do it again.”

The truth of that moved through the bond, steady and immovable.

You hated it. You needed it. You could not decide which feeling scared you more.

“That is exactly the problem,” you said.

His smile was small. “Yeah. I know.”

You touched his chest, just over his heart. “Do you?”

His hand covered yours. For once, the answer took time.

“I know I’m not great at limits when somebody I care about is in trouble,” he said. “I know that’s not fair to the people who have to watch it. I’m working on it.”

The last sentence landed with the weight of something practiced, not because it was false, but because he had said it in other contexts. Recovery was not always about one thing. Sometimes it was about learning how to survive your own instincts in every direction.

You leaned in and kissed him gently.

He accepted it like forgiveness, which made your chest ache.

“This does not get you out of being yelled at later,” you murmured.

His smile touched your mouth. “Wouldn’t dream of it.”

You pushed him back against the pillows, careful of his shoulder. He went willingly, watching you climb over him with a look that made the bond go bright and hot again. You settled over his thighs, the hem of his shirt riding higher than either of you could pretend not to notice, and his hands came to your hips before they froze.

You felt the restraint lock down.

“Roy.”

“I’m being respectful.”

“You are being tense.”

“I contain multitudes.”

“You can touch me.”

His fingers flexed. “Where?”

The question went straight through you.

“Anywhere.”

His mouth parted like he had several answers and trusted none of them. Then his hands slid up your sides beneath his shirt, slowly enough to change your breathing. He followed the reaction, eyes fixed on your face, palms warm against your ribs. When his thumbs brushed the underside of your breasts, pleasure curled low in your stomach and moved through the bond before you could hide it.

Roy swallowed. “Can I?”

You knew what he meant. The shirt was the only thing you had on, and both of you knew it.

“Yes.”

He lifted it carefully anyway, giving you time to stop him, giving you time to help him. The fabric dragged over your skin and disappeared somewhere beside the bed, leaving you bare above him in the crooked lamplight. Roy looked at you with an expression that made you feel too seen, not because of the bond this time, but because of him.

“You’re doing the thing,” you said, self-consciousness flickering despite the heat between you.

“What thing?”

“Looking at me like that.”

His mouth curved, but his voice came out softer than his expression. “I like looking at you.”

“You are very sincere while concussed.”

“I’m not concussed. Jason checked.”

“Jason’s medical standards include ‘still breathing’ and ‘no visible organ loss.’”

Roy laughed, and the sound eased the tightness in your chest. Then his mouth found your collarbone, and the laughter left both of you.

His kisses moved lower, careful and hungry at once. When his lips closed over your nipple, your hips rocked down against him before you could think. Pleasure flashed through the bond. Roy groaned against your skin, his hands tightening on your waist.

“Do that again,” he said.

You did.

The friction pulled a sound from both of you. He was hard beneath you, and the realization would have been obvious without the bond, but feeling his desire from the inside was something else entirely. It was not simple lust. It was layered with months of almosts. Your voice in his ear. Your name in his phone. Your hand reaching for him in the van. Your face above him now, wanting him back.

You bent and kissed him.

Roy met you with enough heat to make the room tilt. His hands roamed carefully, learning you through skin and sensation, until one slid down over your hip and stopped at the outside of your thigh.

There was nothing beneath his hand except bare skin, and the knowledge moved through the bond like a spark catching dry tinder.

Roy went very still.

You felt him pull himself back from the edge, not away from you, but away from rushing. It was almost unfair how much that restraint affected you.

“Tell me where this stops,” he said.

Your breath caught.

Then you held his gaze and answered clearly, because the bond had already stolen subtlety from both of you. “It doesn’t.”

His fingers flexed once against your thigh.

“Sweetheart.”

“I want this,” you said. “I want you. Keep going.”

The restraint in him shifted. It did not disappear, but it changed shape, becoming focus instead of distance. The smile that crossed his face was small, bright, and gone almost immediately beneath concentration.

He shifted you gently onto your back, moving slowly when the bond tugged at the change in position. For a moment, he hovered above you, braced on one arm, hair falling forward, bandaged shoulder held carefully away. His eyes searched your face once more, and whatever he found there softened something in him.

Then he kissed his way down your body, and coherent conversation became less available.

Roy touched you like he had something to prove and all the time in the world to prove it. He drew your shorts down your legs, pausing when the movement pulled you too far apart and the bond complained in a sharp pulse. He solved the problem by keeping one hand on your thigh, grounding both of you. Then his mouth returned to your skin, kissing your hip, your stomach, the inside of your thigh.

You reached down and caught his hair. “Roy.”

He looked up. “Tell me no, and I stop.”

The clarity of it nearly undid you.

You tightened your fingers gently. “I was going to tell you to keep going.”

His eyes darkened.

The first touch of his mouth made your back arch.

Roy groaned like he felt it almost as strongly as you did, which, given the bond, perhaps he did. His hands held your thighs open with careful pressure, not pinning, only steadying. He learned quickly there, too, which should have been unfair and absolutely was. His tongue moved slowly at first, testing, listening to every breath and every tug of your fingers in his hair. When he found a rhythm that made your hips lift, he stayed there.

The bond turned pleasure into a loop.

Your body reacted; Roy felt it; his hunger spiked; you felt that too. It built on itself until the room seemed to narrow around his mouth and your hands and the low sounds he made against you. The headache, the fear, the vault, the shame of wanting too much—all of it receded beneath the weight of being touched by someone who was paying attention.

“Roy,” you gasped.

He slid one hand up your body and found yours, lacing your fingers together beside your hip. The contact steadied the bond and ruined you at the same time.

You came with his name on your mouth.

Roy did not stop until you tugged at his hair and murmured, “Too much.”

He pulled back immediately, pressing one last soft kiss to your thigh before he climbed up your body. His mouth was warm and wet when he kissed you, and the taste of yourself on him sent a fresh wave of heat through you. He smiled against your lips as he felt it.

“Smug,” you whispered.

“Deeply.”

“You were told to be normal.”

“I have never promised that successfully.”

You laughed, breathless, and his expression changed again, going soft in the dim room.

“I like that,” he said.

“What?”

“You laughing.”

The words sat between you, tender and unexpected.

You touched his face. “You are dangerous when you stop joking.”

His smile wavered. “Yeah?”

“Yes.”

“Good dangerous or bad dangerous?”

You kissed him instead of answering. He seemed to understand.

After that, the rest of his clothes came off with less grace than either of you had hoped for. Roy nearly tangled himself in the blanket trying to remove his sweatpants without moving too far away from you, and you laughed so hard the bond lit with his satisfaction before he even freed one ankle. He accused you of enjoying his suffering. You told him his suffering had excellent comedic timing.

The laughter helped.

It made the room less fragile. It reminded you that this was Roy, not only the bond, not only the desperate press of feelings neither of you had invited. Roy, who made terrible jokes when injured. Roy, who sent you pictures of broken arrowheads after midnight. Roy, who looked at you like you were the most impossible machine he had ever been lucky enough to understand.

He reached for the pocket of his discarded pants and produced a condom with triumphant relief.

You raised an eyebrow. “Prepared?”

“I am an optimist.”

“You brought that on a mission?”

“I brought several things on a mission.”

“Do not make me ask follow-up questions.”

He tore the packet open, then paused. His humor faded, replaced by that careful seriousness again.

“Last check,” he said. “Is this what you want?”

The question settled over you, warm and steady.

You were tired, sore, overwhelmed, and still connected to him in ways you did not fully understand. But the answer was clear. It had been clear before the artifact, before the vault, before Roy shielded you from light meant to tear through anything in its path. It had been there in every late call you answered and every joke you pretended not to enjoy.

“Yes,” you said. “You. This. I want it.”

Roy’s breath left him.

He kissed you slowly, and then he rolled the condom on with hands that were not quite steady.

When he settled between your thighs, the bond went quiet for one suspended moment, like even the alien technology understood that this needed its own space. Roy braced himself above you, careful of his shoulder, his body warm and solid against yours. You wrapped your legs around his hips and drew him closer.

He entered you slowly.

Both of you stopped breathing.

The sensation was intense enough on its own, the stretch of him filling you inch by inch, the heat of his body, the tremble in his arms as he held himself back. The bond made it sharper but not less yours. You felt his restraint, his pleasure, the stunned gratitude moving through him as if being wanted by you was something he had not known how badly he needed until it happened.

When he was fully inside, his forehead dropped to yours.

“Okay?” he asked, voice rough.

You nodded, then realized he needed to hear it. “Yes.”

He kissed you, and then he moved.

Slow at first. Careful. Almost too careful, until you tightened your legs around him and drew him deeper. Roy groaned into your mouth, and the sound snapped the last thread of careful restraint between you. His rhythm shifted, still controlled, but fuller now, each thrust dragging pleasure through both of you.

You held onto him carefully, avoiding his injured shoulder, fingers pressing into the muscles of his back. He kissed your jaw, your throat, your mouth whenever he needed to swallow a sound. The bond carried flashes of him: the way you felt around him, the way your voice saying his name nearly unraveled him, the way he kept thinking that this was real and then fearing it might not be.

You cupped his face, forcing him to look at you. “Real.”

His hips stuttered.

“What?”

“This is real,” you said.

Roy’s expression cracked.

He kissed you hard, and the next thrust punched a sound out of you. He followed it, angling his hips until pleasure sparked bright and deep. Your nails dug into his back. He found that rhythm and stayed there, breath coming rough, eyes fixed on you like he needed to watch you feel it.

“There,” you said.

“Yeah?”

“Yes. Roy, please.”

The word “please” did something to him. You felt it ripple through the bond, desire and want and tenderness and a nearly painful need to give you whatever you were asking for. His hand slid between your bodies, fingers finding your clit with the same attention as before.

The pleasure climbed fast.

You clung to him, overwhelmed by the press of his body, the rhythm of him inside you, the touch of his fingers, the bond folding his desire around yours until the room seemed to pulse with it. Roy murmured your name against your mouth, low and unsteady, and that was what pushed you over.

Your orgasm hit in a wave that made you shake beneath him.

Roy followed seconds later, his control finally breaking as he buried his face against your neck and came with a groan that seemed to move through both your bodies at once. The bond flared warm and bright, then softened, carrying the echo of pleasure into something quieter.

For a while, there was only breathing.

Roy shifted carefully, wincing as he moved off his shoulder and onto his side. He dealt with the condom, then came back to you under the blanket with that same hesitation as before, as if he still expected permission to expire without warning.

You moved into his arms before he could ask.

His body relaxed around yours.

The bond had settled to a hum. It no longer hurt. It no longer crowded every thought. It was simply there, a thread between you, warm and strange and temporary.

Roy’s hand moved slowly up and down your back. “You okay?”

“Yes.”

“Pain?”

“Just sore.”

“Regrets?”

You lifted your head.

He was staring past you, trying to make the question sound casual. It did not work. Even without the bond, you thought you would have known.

“No.”

His throat moved. “If tomorrow you decide this was just the artifact—”

“It wasn’t.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I do.”

“Sweetheart.”

You pushed yourself up enough to look at him properly. “Roy.”

He shut up.

“I wanted you before the artifact. I wanted you before the vault. I wanted you when you sent me pictures of broken equipment at two in the morning and pretended you needed technical support when what you needed was someone to stay on the line.”

His face went still.

You softened. “I stayed on the line because I wanted to.”

His arm tightened around you.

For once, he had nothing quick to say.

Then, very quietly, he said, “I didn’t want to be another thing you had to fix.”

Your chest ached.

“You are not a project,” you said.

“I’m a little bit of a project.”

“You are a person who sometimes needs help.”

“People get tired of that.”

“Some do,” you said. “Some answer the phone.”

He closed his eyes.

You kissed him gently, and when he kissed you back, the bond carried gratitude so raw that you nearly cried. You did not. You let him hold you instead.

Jason knocked on the door six hours later with the emotional delicacy of a police raid.

Roy jerked awake beside you. “Occupied.”

“I hate that I know that,” Jason said through the door. “Kori has a reversal plan. Put clothes on.”

Roy’s face went through several stages of horror and resignation.

You buried your face in his chest and laughed.

Jason added, “I’m going to the kitchen. If I see anything I can’t unsee, I’m shooting both of you.”

“You would miss me,” Roy called.

“I would grieve efficiently.”

Kori’s voice floated from farther down the hall. “I am pleased the night went well.”

“Oh my god,” you whispered.

Roy closed his eyes. “The sea is still an option.”

“You are not leaving me alone with them.”

“Right. Teamwork.”

Getting out of bed was less painful than expected. The bond still tugged when you moved too far away, but it no longer punished you for every inch you moved. You borrowed one of Roy’s hoodies because your shirt had somehow ended up under the bed, and because the second he saw you in it, his entire face did something worth preserving for later mockery. This time, you put on the sweatpants, even if you still had no underwear.

“Do not look so smug,” you said.

“I’m looking respectfully.”

“You are not.”

“I’m looking respectfully smug.”

“That is worse.”

When you entered the kitchen, Jason was making coffee with the grim focus of a man trying to survive exposure to other people’s feelings. Kori sat at the table with the shard wrapped in gold fabric before her. She took in Roy’s hoodie and sweats on you, Roy’s hand at the small of your back, and the carefully neutral expression both of you were failing to maintain.

Her smile bloomed.

Jason pointed a spoon at her without turning around. “Don’t.”

“I said nothing.”

“You inhaled.”

“It was a happy inhalation.”

“Don’t do that either.”

You sat at the table, Roy close beside you. “Can we end the bond?”

Kori’s expression sobered. “Yes. It has settled enough. The separation may be uncomfortable, but it should not harm you.”

“And afterward?” Roy asked.

“The forced connection will end. There may be residual sensitivity for a few hours.” She looked between you, not unkindly. “Anything that remains after that is yours.”

Jason muttered, “Great. Science and feelings.”

You looked at Roy. His face was relaxed, but you knew him better now. Even without the bond screaming every emotion across your nerves, you could read the worry in the set of his mouth.

“What?” you asked softly.

He leaned closer, his voice low enough that Jason could pretend not to hear if he wanted to. “What if it feels different when it’s gone?”

“It will.”

His gaze flicked to yours.

“Different does not mean gone,” you said.

He absorbed that. Slowly. Like he wanted to believe you, but did not want to grab too hard in case the belief cracked.

You slid your hand into his under the table. He held on.

The reversal felt like stepping out of a crowded room into silence.

Kori guided your hands and Roy’s around the covered shard. She spoke in a language you did not recognize, soft and rhythmic. The shard warmed beneath your palms. For one last moment, the bond surged open. Roy flooded through you: fear, hope, want, affection, the terrible vulnerability of needing something and choosing to reach for it anyway.

Then the thread snapped.

You gasped.

Roy did too.

The silence inside your own head was immediate and enormous.

You were alone in your body again. No echo of Roy’s pain. No flicker of his desire under your skin. No second heartbeat of concern and care and restless energy. Just you, your breath, your pulse, your hand still touching his over the shard.

You should have felt only relief.

Relief came, yes. But grief came with it.

Roy stared at you across the table. For the first time since the vault, you could not feel him at all.

Then he pushed back his chair just enough to face you properly, cupped your jaw, and kissed you like he meant to make himself understood without supernatural help.

You leaned into him. His hands framed your face, warm and real and chosen. There was no bond to amplify it, no alien resonance making emotion impossible to hide. There was only Roy, kissing you in Jason’s ugly kitchen while Kori made a delighted sound and Jason said something under his breath that would probably ruin the moment if you cared.

You did not care.

Roy broke the kiss just enough to rest his forehead against yours. “Still real?”

You touched his face. “Still real.”

His smile came slowly, bright and relieved enough to make your chest hurt. “Good.”

Jason cleared his throat. “Kitchen.”

Roy did not look away from you. “You have one fork.”

“I eat here emotionally.”

“You do not do anything emotionally.”

“I am about to throw you outside emotionally.”

Kori folded the gold fabric over the shard. “I think this is a successful courtship.”

“It was not courtship,” Jason said automatically.

You glanced at Roy.

His hand found yours.

You smiled despite yourself. “It might be courtship now.”

Roy’s face lit up.

Jason stared at you. “You too?”

“I contain multitudes,” you said.

Roy looked delighted. “That was my line.”

“I improved it.”

“You improve a lot of things.”

The sincerity landed without warning.

You looked at him, and for once, there was no bond to reveal the emotion underneath. You did not need it. Roy was standing in front of you with his hand in yours, bruised, exhausted, warm, and entirely too pleased with himself for someone who had nearly gotten you killed by association.

You squeezed his hand.

Two nights later, Roy sent you a picture of another smoking circuit board.

You were back in your apartment, behind your screens, wearing a shirt you stole from Roy and trying to restore the last pieces of your sleep schedule. The Outlaws were in Prague this time, which you knew because you had routed their travel documents yourself and because Roy had sent you six pictures of street food before Jason confiscated his phone for operational security.

The picture arrived at 12:19 a.m.

terrible news. she’s dead

You zoomed in on the circuit board, then sat back.

that is a capacitor

yeah but she had dreams

You smiled before you could stop yourself.

why are you texting me about a capacitor during a surveillance op?

Roy took fifteen seconds to answer.

because jay said if i asked u out over comms he’d shoot me

Your heart turned over.

Then another message arrived.

dinner when i’m back? not because of alien tech. because i want to see you and ideally not almost die first

You let him wait. Just long enough to preserve your pride.

Then you typed back.

dinner. eight. bring intact technology or don’t come at all.

His reply came almost instantly.

yes ma’am

A second later:

for the record i wanted to ask before the alien overshare

You looked at the message for a long moment, the monitors humming softly around you, the room quiet except for the faint pulse of encrypted channels and the distant city beyond your window.

You answered honestly.

i know

The typing bubble appeared. Vanished. Appeared again.

yeah?

You thought of the first call, the smoking circuit board, the jokes that were not only jokes. You thought of Roy in the vault, pulling you back before the blast hit. Roy in the dark bedroom, asking when he could have taken. Roy in the kitchen after the bond broke, crossing the room because he wanted you without anything alien making the wanting easier to admit.

You typed:

i wanted you to

This time, his answer took longer.

When it came, it was simple.

good. eight.

Your secure comm pinged before you could answer.

Jason’s voice came through a moment later. “Relay.”

“Yes?”

“Tell your boyfriend to stop smiling at his phone during surveillance.”

Roy’s voice protested in the background. “He called me your boyfriend!”

“I heard.”

“You didn’t correct him.”

“I was processing the presumption.”

“You paused.”

“The bond is gone, Harper.”

“I have instincts.”

“You have head trauma.”

“Also instincts.”

Jason made a sound of profound suffering. “I’m muting him.”

Kori’s voice entered the channel, warm and pleased. “I believe this is still courtship.”

“Still not courtship,” Jason said.

Roy laughed, bright and familiar through the line. “Pretty sure it is now.”

You leaned back in your chair, listening to them bicker through the clean channel you had built, the signal steady in your ear. The Outlaws were easy enough when friendship came with protocols. Jason needed routes, Kori needed context, and Roy needed reminders not to touch volatile equipment without supervision.

Roy had become the kind of problem your phone recognized before you did. It buzzed after midnight, and some tired, traitorous part of you already knew it would be him before the screen lit up. Not because he was careless, exactly. Careless people did not send encrypted attachments, blurred circuit diagrams, and three separate angles of a device before asking whether the blinking red light was “a personality thing.” Roy prepared for disaster beautifully. He simply preferred to flirt with it first.

But your phone was in your hand, your smile was already there, and when his voice came through the comm again, softer this time, you did not pretend you had not been waiting for it.

“See you at eight, sweetheart.”

You looked at the monitors, at the open line, at the ridiculous shape your life had taken because Jason Todd had once climbed through the window with a hard drive and Roy Harper had never learned when to leave well enough alone.

“Try not to die before our date, Arsenal.”

His laugh warmed the channel.

“Wouldn’t dream of it.”

Not because you remembered losing your own parents. There had never been anyone for you to remember. No faces blurred soft by time, no voices you could almost hear in dreams, no treasured story about where you came from that anyone had been able to give back to you. Your life began, as far as anyone at Haly’s could tell, in a basket left near the performers’ entrance before dawn, wrapped in a blanket too thin for the weather and tucked beneath the faded canvas awning like whoever had left you there hoped the circus might know what to do with unwanted things.

The circus had.

Haly’s had taken you in the way a traveling circus took in anything strange, broken, useful, or lost. Not neatly. Not legally at first. Not with the clean lines adults liked to draw around family. You were passed between trailers and arms, fed from chipped bowls, tucked into spare bunks, watched by whoever was not performing, repairing, rehearsing, or sleeping. The roustabouts taught you knots. The clowns taught you how to make people look where you wanted them to look. The animal handlers taught you patience. Mary Grayson taught you how to braid your hair so it stayed out of your face. John Grayson taught you how to fall without breaking your wrists.

Dick taught you how to be a child.

He had been born into the circus, bright and laughing and fearless, with a last name that meant applause and parents who caught him whenever he leaped. For a while, you thought that made him different from you in some permanent, untouchable way. He belonged to people. He belonged to the air. He belonged to the story everyone told when the lights went up, and the Flying Graysons climbed toward the rigging.

Then he caught you stealing sugared almonds from a vendor’s crate when you were six years old and immediately asked why you had not taken more.

“You’re supposed to tell,” you said, clutching the paper bag to your chest.

Dick looked offended by the idea. “I’m supposed to get half.”

That was the beginning of everything.

By the time you were old enough to understand that the Graysons were not yours in any official way, it no longer mattered. Mary still checked whether you had eaten before shows. John still lifted you onto his shoulders when the crowds got too thick. Dick still came looking for you first whenever he had something funny, stupid, or dangerous to do. You were not a Grayson on paper, but you knew the rhythm of their trailer at night. You knew the smell of Mary’s perfume and rosin. You knew John’s laugh from across the lot. You knew Dick’s hand in the dark without needing to look.

They were still the first people who made you understand what parents were supposed to feel like.

The night they died, the air smelled like sawdust and rain.

You remembered that more clearly than you wanted to. The damp edge of the tent canvas. The crowd murmuring with that restless, eager hunger that came before the big act. The yellow-white glare of the lights. Dick’s shoulder pressed against yours backstage as he bounced on his toes, pretending not to be nervous. He was wearing red, green, and gold, the colors bright enough that he looked almost impossible to hurt.

Mary kissed his forehead before she climbed.

John winked at you.

“Watch closely, little sparrow,” he said. “You’ll miss the best part.”

You did watch.

For years afterward, you wished you had looked away.

There was a particular kind of silence that came after the ropes snapped, a silence too large for the tent, too large for the crowd, too large for your body. It opened like a wound. For one suspended moment, everyone seemed to believe that gravity could still change its mind.

Then Mary and John Grayson hit the ground.

Dick screamed.

You did not remember moving, but you remembered reaching him. He was fighting every adult hand that tried to hold him back, his small body twisting with a violence that made men twice his size flinch. You wrapped both arms around him from behind and held on because you knew he would try to run to them if you let go, and some desperate, practical part of you understood that if he got close enough to see everything, something inside him would never come back.

He elbowed you hard in the ribs. You did not let go.

“Let me go,” he choked.

You pressed your face into his shoulder and held tighter. “I can’t.”

“They’re my parents.”

“I know.”

“You don’t know.”

The words tore out of him before he could think better of them, and the second they were in the air, you felt him go still. Even in the middle of the worst moment of his life, Dick Grayson knew when he had cut too deep.

You closed your eyes. Your chest hurt where he had hit you. It hurt worse where he had not meant to.

“They were mine too,” you whispered.

Dick broke then. Not neatly. Not quietly. His knees buckled, and you went down with him in the sawdust, your arms still locked around his shaking body while the circus collapsed into shouts and footsteps and sobs around you.

You sat beside him on the narrow cot in the back of the medical tent and held his hand while the circus packed itself into whispers around you. Someone had wrapped a blanket around his shoulders. It kept sliding down one side because he would not release you long enough to fix it.

Bruce Wayne arrived in an expensive coat with a face like carved stone and eyes that looked too familiar for a stranger’s. He spoke to the police first, then to Mr. Haly, then to a woman from social services who kept glancing at Dick as if he might shatter if she looked directly at him for too long.

Finally, Bruce came to the cot.

He crouched instead of standing over Dick. That was the first thing you noticed about him. He was rich enough to own the ground beneath his feet, probably, but he crouched in the dirt and mud of the circus lot so Dick would not have to look up.

“Dick,” he said gently. “My name is Bruce Wayne.”

Dick stared at him.

“I knew your parents,” Bruce continued. “Not well, but enough to know they loved you.”

Dick’s fingers tightened around yours until your knuckles ached. You did not pull away.

Bruce’s gaze flicked briefly to your joined hands. “I want to help.”

It was the sort of thing adults said when they had already decided what help meant. You knew that too, though not because you remembered being left. You knew because you had grown up with the knowledge of it sitting under your skin like an old splinter. Adults said help and meant papers. They said help and meant moving. They said “help” and meant a bed in a room that smelled wrong, and a life chosen by strangers who got to go home afterward.

Dick knew it from you.

He had watched you grow up with the vocabulary of being left behind. He had seen the way you went quiet whenever inspectors came too close, whenever someone asked who was responsible for you, whenever an adult with a clipboard looked at you like a problem that had learned to walk and speak. He had followed you around until you either had to talk to him or throw something at him, and when you had chosen to throw something, he had only ducked, grinned, and declared that your aim needed work.

He knew what happened to children who belonged nowhere.

So when Bruce Wayne said, “You can come with me,” Dick did not ask where.

He looked at you.

The woman from social services shifted. “Mr. Grayson—”

“No,” Dick said.

It was the first word he had spoken in hours. His voice was raw and small and still somehow absolute.

Bruce did not move. “No?”

Dick lifted his chin. His eyes were red, but dry. “I’m not going without her.”

The woman started to say your name, then stopped because she had only read it off a file and did not know how to make it sound like it belonged to you.

Bruce looked at you again. Not with pity, exactly. With calculation, maybe, but not the cold kind. His face changed by degrees as he understood that this was not a child asking to bring along a favorite toy or a familiar blanket.

This was Dick Grayson drawing a line around the last piece of home he had left.

“I see,” Bruce said.

“You don’t,” Dick snapped.

You flinched at the sharpness of it, but Bruce did not.

“No,” Bruce agreed quietly. “Probably not.”

Dick looked ready to hate him for that too. He looked ready to hate anything that required less effort than falling apart. Then his hand trembled in yours, just once, and his face twisted before he managed to force it still again.

You leaned closer until your shoulder touched his.

Bruce saw that too.

The argument lasted longer than it should have, though most of it happened above your heads and around corners. There were phone calls. There were questions about guardianship, placement, emergency petitions, and temporary arrangements. You heard the phrase “not related” at least four times, always in the tones adults used when they thought blood was the only thing that made a family hard to separate.

In the end, Bruce Wayne did what rich men in Gotham did best.

He made the impossible bureaucratically inconvenient enough that people stopped telling him no.

You left the circus in the back seat of his car with Dick pressed against your side and both of your lives packed into two bags in the trunk. Wayne Manor rose out of the dark like something from a ghost story, too large to be real and too silent to be kind.

Alfred Pennyworth met you at the door.

He took one look at Dick, then at you, then at the way neither of you had released the other’s hand.

“Master Dick,” he said, as if Dick had always been expected. Then, turning to you, he added your name with the same grave courtesy. “Welcome home.”

You did not believe him.

But Dick breathed for the first time since the circus lot, and because Dick breathed, you tried.

Wayne Manor did not become home quickly.

The manor was too large. That was your first thought, and it remained your strongest impression for weeks. Too many rooms. Too many staircases. Too many windows looking out over grounds that did not pack up and leave at sunrise. The quiet was not peaceful. It pressed against your ears until you missed the generators, the animals, the distant laughter, the familiar arguments over equipment and laundry and pay.

Dick hated it more openly than you did.

He ran through the halls like speed could make the walls less solid. He climbed banisters, chandeliers, bookshelves, anything that allowed him to get his feet off the ground. He argued with Bruce, with Alfred, with tutors, with anyone who tried to tell him what he was allowed to feel. At night, when he thought you were asleep, he left his room and sat on the floor outside yours.

You started leaving the door open.

Neither of you talked about why.

Bruce tried. You would give him that later, when you were old enough to understand the shape of his failure. He cared clumsily, intensely, with the panic of a man who had never learned how to help a grieving child except by giving him a mission. Dick was angry. Bruce had a place to put his anger. That was how Robin was born.

Dick told you the first night. Of course he did. He came to your room before patrol, still pulling at the gloves, trying to look brave and failing because he kept checking your face.

“Bruce says it’s training,” he said.

“Is it?”

Dick looked down at the bright colors beneath his jacket. “It’s something.”

Three weeks later, he came through your window at two in the morning with a split lip, bruised knuckles, and no chance of pretending it was only training anymore.

You stared at him from your bed.

He stared back.

Then you threw a pillow at his head.

“Ow.”

“You’re wearing traffic-light colors.”

Dick, who had clearly expected fear, anger, or betrayal, looked down at himself. “They’re not that bad.”

“You look like Christmas got into a fight.”

He pressed a hand to his mouth, trying not to smile because his lip was bleeding. “Don’t tell Bruce how bad it looks.”

“Bruce was there.”

“Then don’t tell Alfred.”

“Alfred definitely knows.”

Dick sighed and leaned back against the wall beneath your window. His face changed when the joke faded. In the moonlight, he looked younger than he had all day.

“I can do something now,” he said.

You sat up slowly. “Does it help?”

He looked at his hands. “Sometimes.”

That was the first night you cleaned blood from his face.

You did not know what you were doing then. You used too much antiseptic and made him hiss. Your hands shook. Dick sat on the edge of your bed and let you work, his knee bouncing until you slapped it still. He watched you with those huge blue eyes that had once reflected spotlights and now carried rooftops.

“You don’t have to do this,” he said.

“Yes, I do.”

“Why?”

Because Mary was not there to check him. Because John was not there to teach him how to fall. Because Bruce was turning him into something sharp, and Alfred could not be everywhere, and you had already lost too much to sit still while Dick came apart in pieces.

Because he had said she’s with me, and you had never stopped being grateful.

You dabbed at his lip more gently. “Because you’d do it wrong.”

Dick smiled, small and real. “Probably.”

So it began.

Robin came home bleeding, and you learned. Alfred taught you first aid with the weary resignation of a man who knew forbidding you would only make you sneakier. You learned how to clean cuts, how to wrap ribs, how to spot a concussion, how to tell when Dick was joking to hide pain and when he was joking because he was genuinely pleased with himself. You learned that Bruce went quiet when he was worried, that Alfred used sarcasm as a pressure valve, that the Cave was colder than any place under a home should be.

You did not become a vigilante.

Dick asked once, carefully, after you had thrown a practice knife so hard it stuck in the training mat beside his head.

“You could,” he said.

You looked at him. He was fourteen then, all elbows and restless guilt, still growing into his grief. “Could what?”

“Train. Come out with me.”

“No.”

“You didn’t even think about it.”

“I did. No.”

His shoulders dropped, though he tried to hide it. “Why?”

“Because someone has to be here when you come back.”

That shut him up.

You were proud of that for almost two whole days.

Years passed the way they did in Gotham, measured less by birthdays and more by scars. Dick grew taller. His voice changed. His smile became something people followed without knowing why. Robin became a name whispered by criminals and children alike, bright enough to make Batman’s shadow seem survivable.

People started noticing him before either of you knew what to do with it. Girls at school first, then women at galas, then everyone. It was impossible not to. 

Dick Grayson had a way of making attention feel accidental, as if he had only smiled because he could not help it, as if the warmth in his voice belonged entirely to whoever stood in front of him. He could lean against a doorway, flash that grin, and make strangers feel as if they had been chosen. He flirted the same way he fought, quick and graceful and half a step ahead, leaving people blinking after him as if he had taken the light with him when he moved on.

You learned to look away. 

Not all the time. Not enough for anyone to notice. Just when someone laughed too brightly at something he said, or when his hand lingered at a waist during a gala dance, or when he came back from patrol with lipstick on his cheek and blood on his knuckles, grinning like both had been equally harmless.

You told yourself it did not matter. 

You had known him before the charm fit right. Before the smile became practiced. Before Robin turned him into Gotham’s golden boy. You had known the child outside your bedroom door, knees drawn to his chest, too proud to cry where anyone could see.

Somehow, that made it worse.

You watched from the Cave, from the Manor, from the edge of his life where you had always stood, with bandages in one hand and your heart in the other.

Then Dick began to outgrow Robin.

Or Bruce began to outgrow the idea that Robin could belong to anyone who questioned him. Or Gotham asked too much of a name that had been built for a grieving boy in bright colors. Maybe all of it happened at once.

At first, it happened quietly. A costume worn with impatience. A name that no longer fit cleanly in his mouth. Arguments with Bruce that ended with doors closing too carefully, because slamming them would have admitted too much. Dick had spent years turning Robin into something bright enough to survive Batman’s shadow, only to realize brightness could become its own kind of cage.

And you, selfishly, missed the cage.

Not because you wanted him trapped. Never that. But Robin had been the part of him that still came home to the Cave, still climbed through your window, still bled where you could reach him. Whatever came next would belong to the world even more than he already did.

You hated yourself a little for knowing that before he said it aloud.

Their fights got worse before they got quieter. That was how you knew it was serious. Dick and Bruce shouting was unpleasant, but familiar. Silence between them felt like a door closing.

By the time Dick chose Nightwing, it no longer felt like a costume change. It felt like an escape route.

He came home in black and blue for the first time with blood on his jaw and something fragile beneath his smile, as if he had expected the new colors to make him feel free all at once and had been disappointed to discover that becoming yourself still hurt. You stood in the Cave with gauze in one hand and antiseptic in the other, looking at the winged symbol across his chest.

He looked older. Not because of the suit, though the suit helped. Not because of the blood, either; you had seen too much of that for it to mean what it should have. He looked older because, for the first time, he seemed to be standing outside the life Bruce had built for him and deciding whether to come back in. 

“Nightwing,” he said, like he was testing whether the name would hold.

You looked up at him. “That’s what you’re calling yourself now?”

His smile flickered. “You hate it?”

You hated that you didn’t.

You hated that it suited him. The dark, the blue, the clean break of it. You hated that Robin had looked like a boy trying to survive grief, and Nightwing looked like someone who might actually outrun it.

“No,” you said, softer than you meant to. “I don’t hate it.”

Something in his shoulders loosened. Not much. Just enough to hurt.

He stepped closer, holding still while you pressed gauze to the cut along his jaw. “Bruce does.”

“Bruce hates anything he didn’t build himself.”

Dick laughed under his breath, but it did not last. His eyes dropped to your hands. “Do you?”

You knew what he was really asking. Not whether you hated the name. Not whether you hated the suit. Whether you hated that he had chosen a door and walked through it without you.

“No,” you said again.

This time, it cost more.

He sat on the edge of the med table and let you clean the cut along his jaw. For once, he did not fill the silence with jokes. He watched your hands instead, his eyes following the familiar motions like they were the only part of the night he trusted.

“Does it look stupid?” he asked eventually.

You glanced up.

There were a dozen easy answers. You could have teased him about the collar, the symbol, the dramatic little wings. You could have told him the suit was impractical in at least three places and that he still needed better armor around his ribs because, apparently, every criminal in Gotham had decided his torso was a community punching bag.

Instead, you looked at him properly.

He was older than Robin had ever been allowed to become. Not fully grown, not fully free, but closer to himself than he had looked in months.

“No,” you said. “It looks like you.”

Dick went very still.

Then he looked away, blinking too quickly. “Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

He breathed out, and for a moment the Cave did not feel quite so cold.

Then Jason came.

He arrived all elbows and suspicion, a street kid with quick hands, quicker teeth, and the wary look of someone who expected every kindness to come with a bill. Bruce brought him into the manor with that familiar grim certainty he wore whenever he had already decided a child needed saving and had not yet considered whether the child wanted to be saved by him.

Dick did not take it well.

He was older by then, old enough to know that a lonely child deserved food, shelter, training, and someone willing to stand between him and the city. He was also young enough for it to hurt when Bruce looked at another dark-haired boy with bruised knuckles and saw a mission. The manor shifted around Jason the way it had once shifted around Dick, and Dick smiled too brightly through it, which meant he was angry enough to be careful.

Jason noticed, of course. Jason noticed everything. He noticed the Cave, the rules, the silences, the way Bruce gave orders instead of comfort, the way Dick’s name still lived in the walls even after he had started spending more nights away than home. He noticed you too, hovering near the med bay with gauze in your hands and an expression that probably looked too much like pity for his taste.

“I don’t need a nurse,” he snapped the first time Bruce brought him back bleeding.

“Good,” you said, snapping on gloves. “I’m not one.”

Jason eyed you. “Then what are you?”

“Tired.”

Dick laughed from the other side of the Cave, sharp and surprised, and Jason looked deeply offended that anyone had found the exchange funny.

You liked him immediately.

Not because he was easy. Jason was not easy. He bit at every soft thing offered to him and then looked startled when people did not take it back. He argued with Alfred, hoarded food as if he would not be fed again, read books as if he expected someone to confiscate them, and pretended not to lean into the warmth of the manor, even as it slowly sank into his skin.

He was not Dick.

That should have made things simpler. It did not.

Because Jason eventually put on the Robin colors, and the first time you saw him in them, your stomach twisted before you could stop it. The suit had been altered, fitted to a different body, a different stance, a different kind of anger, but the colors were the same. Red, green, yellow. Bright enough to dare the dark to look away.

Dick went very quiet that night.

Jason noticed that too.

“You got a problem?” he demanded, chin lifted like he was ready to swing first and find out why later.

Dick’s smile was pleasant in the way storms looked peaceful from far away. “No.”

“Liar.”

“Jason,” Bruce warned.

“No, he’s been looking at me like I stole something.”

Dick’s face changed.

You saw it happen and stepped forward before Bruce could make it worse. “Jason.”

“What?”

“You’re bleeding on the floor.”

That distracted him for exactly half a second. “So?”

“So Alfred just mopped.”

Jason looked down at the small red drops near his boot, then back at you. “That’s what you’re worried about?”

“Yes.”

“You people are weird.”

“Deeply. Sit down.”

He sat, muttering, and you cleaned the cut across his forearm while Dick stood a little too far away and watched a boy who was not him wear the name he had not realized he still thought of as his.

After that, something in the manor changed again.

Jason became Robin loudly, defiantly, with less grace than Dick and more force. He argued with Batman in the field, swore when he thought Alfred could not hear him, and came to you with injuries he pretended were not bad until you raised an eyebrow and he folded under the weight of being known. Sometimes, when Dick came home, he found Jason in the med bay eating your snacks and insulting your bandaging technique. Sometimes he looked amused. Sometimes he looked like he had walked into his own past and found someone else living there.

You never asked if that hurt.

You knew it did.

Dick was not cruel to Jason. That almost made it worse. Cruelty would have been simple, and Dick had never been simple where lonely children were concerned. He taught Jason holds that Bruce had never bothered to explain gently. He showed him how to land on bad rooftops, how to listen for the difference between a scared witness and a lying one, how to talk Batman down when his silence started turning into something sharper. He complained afterward, of course. He told you Jason was reckless, stubborn, mouthy, impossible.

You always waited him out.

Eventually, Dick would sigh and add, “He’s good, though.”

And you would say, “I know.”

And Dick would look toward the Cave, where Jason’s laughter sometimes echoed too loudly because he had not yet learned that the manor punished joy by making it sound lonely.

“Bruce doesn’t know what to do with him,” Dick said once.

You pressed fresh gauze to the cut above his eyebrow. “Bruce doesn’t know what to do with anyone.”

Dick smiled faintly. “You do.”

“No. I just know where the bandages are.”

“That’s more than most people.”

The problem was not that Jason had taken Robin. Not exactly. Dick had already chosen Nightwing by then, had already stepped into black and blue and tried to tell himself that leaving the old colors behind meant they no longer had the power to hurt him. The problem was that Bruce had let the name move on more easily than he had let Dick move on. Robin could become someone else. Dick was still expected to remain within reach, still expected to answer when Bruce called, still expected to translate silence into need and orders into love.

It wore at him.

Their fights changed shape. They were no longer only about patrol routes, curfews, training, or whether Dick had disobeyed an order in the field. They became fights about who Dick was allowed to be when he was not standing beside Batman. They became fights about distance, independence, loyalty, and the ugly little question Bruce never asked plainly: if Dick was not Robin, if he was not a boy in need of saving, if he was not Batman’s partner first, then what was he to him?

The shouting was unpleasant, but familiar.

The silence after was worse.

When Dick told you he was leaving, he did it on the roof of the manor.

He had always liked heights when he had something difficult to say. You found him sitting near the edge, knees drawn up, the city spread below him in glittering black and gold. He was older than his parents had ever gotten to see him become. That thought hit you sometimes without warning and made you want to sit down.

“Blüdhaven,” he said.

You lowered yourself beside him. “That’s a city, not an explanation.”

“It needs help.”

“So does Gotham.”

“Gotham has Batman.”

“Gotham has you.”

He looked at you then, and there was something tired beneath the familiar warmth. “That’s the problem.”

You did not answer right away. The wind pulled at your hair. Far below, the grounds of Wayne Manor stretched dark and endless, a place that had sheltered you without ever fully becoming yours.

“When?” you asked.

“Soon.”

“Apartment?”

“Crappy.”

“Dangerous neighborhood?”

“Probably.”

“Elevator?”

He winced. “Sometimes.”

You nodded. “I’ll pack light.”

Dick’s head snapped toward you. “No.”

You raised an eyebrow. “No?”

“I’m not asking you to come with me.”

“Good thing I didn’t wait for you to ask.”

“I’m serious.” He turned fully now, one knee tucked beneath him, hands moving the way they always did when he wanted to reach for you and thought better of it. “This isn’t like before. I’m not a kid telling Bruce I won’t go without you.”

“No,” you said. “You’re an adult trying to make my decisions for me. Very different.”

His mouth tightened. “Blüdhaven is dangerous.”

“So is Gotham.”

“I’ll be doing this alone.”

“No, you won’t.”

He stared at you, and for a second, he was twelve again, sitting on the steps of a trailer with your sleeve twisted in his fist.

“You have a life here,” he said.

You softened despite yourself. “Dick.”

“You do.”

“I have a room here. I have work here. I have Alfred threatening me with tea every time I skip breakfast. I have Bruce pretending not to care whether I’m home before midnight. I have all of that because you brought me here.”

His face shifted.

You reached over and took his hand. His fingers closed around yours automatically. They always had.

“You didn’t leave me behind,” you said. “Don’t insult me by thinking I’d do it to you.”

For once, Dick Grayson had nothing clever to say.

The apartment in Blüdhaven was, as promised, crappy.

The heat worked when it felt appreciated. The shower made a sound like a dying animal. The kitchen cabinets had been painted an optimistic yellow by someone who had clearly given up halfway through. The bedroom situation was awkward for exactly fourteen seconds, because there was one actual bedroom and one narrow living room with a couch that looked personally offended by the idea of sleep.

“You take the room,” Dick said.

You dropped a box of medical supplies on the counter. “We’ll switch.”

“No.”

“Then I’ll take the couch.”

“No.”

“Then we’ll both sleep standing up in the hallway.”

He dragged a hand down his face. “Why are you like this?”

“Circus-raised. Poorly socialized. Deeply charming.”

“You forgot stubborn.”

“I assumed that was implied.”

You took the bedroom. Dick took the couch. Two weeks later, after you found him asleep half on the floor with one leg bent at an angle that made your spine ache in sympathy, you bought a secondhand bed frame and shoved it into the bedroom while he was out. He came home through the window at three in the morning, bleeding from the shoulder and halfway through a complaint about someone named Torque, only to stop dead in the doorway.

“Why are there two beds in here?”

“Because your spine is going to turn into modern art.”

He looked from the beds to you.

You pointed at the bathroom. “Shower. Then stitches.”

“You moved furniture by yourself?”

“I had help.”

“From who?”

“The terrifying woman downstairs who smokes on the fire escape and calls you Pretty Boy.”

Dick blinked. “Mrs. Alvarez?”

“She likes me.”

“Everyone likes you.”

“That is demonstrably untrue. Shower.”

Domesticity arrived without either of you inviting it.

It came in the form of grocery lists stuck to the fridge beneath a pineapple-shaped magnet. It came in arguments over whether cereal counted as dinner. It came in Dick leaving escrima sticks on the coffee table and you threatening to hide them in the freezer. It came in your scrubs in the laundry with his compression shirts, your medical textbooks stacked beside his case files, your shampoo in the shower next to the cheap body wash he bought because it had been on sale.

It came in windows left unlocked.

Nightwing was different from Robin. You saw it before anyone else did, maybe because you had known Dick before the masks. Robin had been defiance in bright colors, a child refusing to let grief be the last thing his parents gave him. Nightwing was something else. A choice. A declaration. A man stepping out of Batman’s shadow and building his own silhouette against the skyline.

Blüdhaven did not teach you that Dick was beautiful. You had learned that lesson years ago and suffered through the review often enough. Blüdhaven only removed the distance.

In Gotham, wanting Dick had been something you could fold away between patrols, galas, and all the other people drawn into his orbit. There had always been space if you needed it: the Cave, the Manor, the long hallways, the easy excuse of being busy. Blüdhaven took all of that away.

It put him across from you at breakfast, sleep-warm and shirtless, reaching around you for coffee with his chin nearly brushing your shoulder. It put his laundry with yours, his bruises under your hands, his laughter in the next room, his body in your peripheral vision until looking away became less of a choice and more of a survival skill.

Survival, unfortunately, required practice.

He came out of the shower with towels low on his hips and water running down the lines of his back. He cooked shirtless when the apartment got too hot, which was both often and completely unnecessary. He stretched in the living room after patrol, all long limbs and controlled strength, while you stared aggressively at insurance paperwork and pretended not to notice the way his muscles moved beneath bruised skin.

Worse, he was affectionate.

Dick had always touched easily, but Blüdhaven sharpened it into a habit. A hand on your lower back when he passed behind you in the kitchen. His chin hooked over your shoulder while you stirred pasta. Fingers tugging gently at the end of your braid when he wanted your attention. His body collapsing beside yours on the couch after patrol, head landing in your lap like he had never once considered the possibility that it might be dangerous for your sanity.

“You smell like smoke,” you told him one night.

“Warehouse fire.”

“You were at the docks.”

“And there was a warehouse fire.”

“Convenient.”

“Not for the warehouse.”

You flicked his forehead. He smiled up at you, eyes half-lidded, hair mussed, one cheekbone blooming purple. Your hand was still in his hair because he had put it there ten minutes earlier and then made a pleased sound when you scratched lightly at his scalp.

Your heart did something foolish.

Dick noticed because he always noticed you, even when he missed the obvious thing sitting between you with a neon sign.

“You okay?”

“Fine.”

“You did the thing.”

“What thing?”

“The quiet thing.”

“I’m quiet all the time.”

“No,” he said, and his voice gentled. “You get quiet when something hurts.”

That was the problem with being loved by someone who knew you before language had finished forming around your wounds. Dick had too much access. He knew how to read you by the breath, by the pause, by the angle of your hand on his shoulder. You could lie to anyone else. With him, the lie had to be built around the truth or he would see through it immediately.

“I’m tired,” you said.

That was true enough.

His hand found yours where it rested against the couch. “Go to bed. I’ll clean up.”

“You say that like your version of cleaning up doesn’t involve putting dishes in the sink and hoping they emotionally mature into being washed.”

“I’m giving them room to grow.”

“You’re a menace.”

“Your menace.”

He said it easily. Carelessly.

Your chest ached for the rest of the night.

The years did not stay kind enough to let Jason remain only a complication.

Jason died.

After that, the Manor became a mausoleum of everything no one had said in time. Bruce got quieter. Dick got worse at coming home. Alfred polished silver no one used and set places at tables no one could sit at without feeling the empty chair.

Then Tim came, clever and too young and carrying a camera, a theory, and the terrible conviction that Batman needed Robin to keep from becoming something worse. Bruce let the colors back into the Cave because grief had never stopped him from repeating himself.

By the time Jason came back, he was older than he should have been and crueler than death had any right to make him. 

You and Dick had been in Blüdhaven long enough by then for the apartment to smell like his shampoo, your coffee, and rain off the harbor, long enough for the city to become familiar enough to complain about, long enough for everyone except the two of you to notice what had been sitting in the room for years.

Barbara noticed first, because Barbara Gordon noticed everything and had the decency to pretend she did not until pretending became insulting.

“He’s in love with you,” she said one afternoon, not looking up from the tablet balanced on her knees.

You nearly dropped the mug you were washing. “Who?”

Barbara looked at you over her glasses.

You turned back to the sink. “No, he isn’t.”

“I didn’t say a name.”

“There are a limited number of people you could mean.”

“Mhm.”

“He’s Dick.”

“Yes. Tragically, I’ve met him.”

“He’s like that with everyone.”

Barbara’s expression softened, which was worse than teasing. “No, he performs with everyone.” A pause, brief enough to be mercy. “Some of us learn that the hard way. He rests with you.”

You hated that enough to remember it.

Jason noticed with less grace.

He was in Blüdhaven for reasons he refused to explain, which meant they were either criminal, personal, or both. You found out only because he came through the apartment window just after midnight, bleeding from the eyebrow and carrying a red helmet under one arm, as if proximity had made your kitchen an acceptable substitute for a med bay.

“No,” you said from the kitchen table.

Jason paused with one leg inside. “Wow. Rude.”

“The Cave has med kits.”

“The Cave has Bruce.” 

“You have safehouses.”

“Safehouses don’t have you.”

You blinked.

Jason looked annoyed that he had said it. “And the Cave has Alfred.”

“Alfred knows where the bandages are.”

“Alfred asks questions.”

“And I don’t?”

Jason swung the rest of the way inside and dropped into the chair across from you. “You ask meaner questions, but you don’t make me answer them.”

You stood slowly, already reaching for the kit under the sink. “That better not be arterial.”

“Do I look like I’d climb six floors with arterial bleeding?”

“You look like you’d do it out of spite.”

“Fair.”

You pulled the kit onto the table and looked at him properly. “Why me, Jason?”

His grin thinned into something almost honest. “Because you knew me before the helmet.”

You went still.

Jason looked away first, his jaw working once, as if he regretted saying even that much. “Before I died too,” he added, like he could make the words casual by saying them badly. “And you don’t do the thing.”

“What thing?”

Jason’s mouth tightened. “Look at me like you’re trying to figure out which parts came back wrong.”

For a moment, the kitchen went quiet.

Then he ruined it on purpose. “Also,” he added, “you have the good tape.”

You let him have the deflection because he had already given you more than he meant to. “It’s normal medical tape.”

“Yeah, but you don’t make it feel like a leash.”

That one landed closer to the bone than you expected.

“Jason.”

“What? I said you had good tape.”

You let the lie stand. “You came here because you’re bleeding on my floor.”

“It can be two things.”

You snapped on gloves and stepped between his knees, tilting his chin toward the light. 

Dick was still on patrol, and Jason had clearly counted on that too. Every masked man in your life had the self-preservation instincts of a moth near a porch light, but Jason was the only one petty enough to schedule his bleeding around Dick’s absence.

Jason watched you clean the cut for about thirty seconds before saying, “So, are you and Boy Wonder still doing the world’s saddest foreplay routine?”

You pressed gauze harder than necessary against his eyebrow.

“Ow.”

“Hold still.”

“Hit a nerve?”

“I’m holding antiseptic and you’re bleeding above the eye. Choose your next words carefully.”

Jason grinned. “That a yes?”

“It’s a no.”

“Sure. That’s why he calls you when he’s bleeding, smiles like an idiot when you yell at him, and keeps your favorite cereal on the top shelf where he thinks I won’t find it.”

“You went through my cabinets?”

“It was reconnaissance.”

“It was creepy.”

“It was educational.” His eyes flicked toward the window, then back to you. “He know?”

You did not pretend not to understand. Jason would only get more annoying. “There’s nothing to know.”

“Oh, this is worse than I thought.”

You taped gauze over the cut. “There. Try not to get punched in the same place for at least six hours.”

Jason stood, still grinning, and picked up his helmet. “You know, when he figures it out, he’s gonna be unbearable.”

“He’s already unbearable.”

“Yeah, but he’ll be happy unbearable. That’s worse.”

Tim noticed within three minutes of his first visit and said nothing, which was how you knew he was Bruce’s son in all the most unsettling ways.

Alfred noticed before anyone, probably before there was anything to notice, and handled it by sending care packages addressed to both of you with enough tea, suture thread, homemade biscuits, and pointed silence to qualify as emotional warfare.

Dick noticed nothing.

Or he noticed and chose not to name it.

There were women. Of course there were women. Dick Grayson did not set out to collect devotion, but he drew it the way bright things drew hands. You watched him date because you had watched him do everything. You gave opinions on shirts, traded shifts at the clinic when his dinner plans ran late, listened when things ended, and pretended not to feel relieved when they did.

It was not fair to resent people for wanting him.

You wanted him too.

That was the thing you folded carefully and hid beneath the guise of being useful. You were good at being useful. Useful had kept you fed as a child. Useful had earned you a place in spaces where no paperwork proved you belonged. Useful gave your hands something to do when Dick came home bleeding and your heart tried to climb out of your throat.

Then he came home one night with lipstick still smudged at the corner of his mouth.

It was a stupid thing to break you.

Not the bruises, not the danger, not the years of him smiling at other people. A faint red stain near his lower lip, half-wiped and still unmistakable, where someone else’s mouth had been. He was talking while he climbed through the window, breathless from patrol or maybe from whatever had happened after patrol, and you stood by the counter with a roll of bandages in your hand, staring like the world had narrowed to the shape of his mouth.

“Hey,” he said, slowing. “You okay?”

You looked up. “Fine.”

His brow furrowed. “You’re doing the thing again.”

“I’m not.”

“You are.”

“Dick.”

“What happened?”

You laughed once, softly, and hated the sound. “Nothing happened.”

He stepped closer. “Talk to me.”

“I don’t want to.”

That stopped him more effectively than shouting would have. You rarely refused him directly. Not because you could not, but because the two of you had built your lives on being reachable to each other. Even when you fought, even when you were angry, there was always a door left open somewhere.

Dick looked at you as if he had just heard one close.

“Okay,” he said carefully. “That’s okay.”

It was not okay. You could see him trying to make it okay because he loved you as a friend, because he was kind, because he had no idea that his kindness was another hand around your throat.

You set the bandages down. “I think I should move out.”

The apartment went quiet.

Dick stared at you.

For a long second, he did not seem to understand the words. Then his face changed so quickly it hurt to watch.

“What?”

“I’ve been thinking about it.”

“No, you haven’t.”

Your temper sparked because he was right. “You don’t know that.”

“Yes, I do.”

“You don’t get to decide what I’ve been thinking.”

“I know when you’re lying to me.”

“Maybe you don’t know me as well as you think.”

It was cruel. You knew it as soon as you said it, but you were tired and jealous and ashamed, and the lipstick on his face was still there, small and red and damning.

Dick flinched.

You wanted to take it back. You wanted to walk into his arms. You wanted to be ten years old again, small enough to crawl into Mary Grayson’s lap and let someone else decide what happened next.

Instead, you folded your arms over your chest.

Dick’s voice dropped. “Do you want to leave?”

No.

The answer filled your mouth so completely you had to swallow around it.

“I think it would be better,” you said.

“For who?”

“For both of us.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

“Dick.”

“No.” His own anger showed then, not loud but bright enough to light his eyes. “Don’t do that. Don’t use the voice you use when you’re trying to get me to hold still for stitches.”

“I am trying to have a conversation.”

“You’re trying to leave without telling me why.”

“Because you don’t need me here forever.”

His mouth parted slightly.

The words kept coming because once you started bleeding, you had never known how to stop neatly.

“You don’t. You needed me when we were kids, and maybe you needed me when you left Bruce, but you have a life here now. You’re Nightwing. You have friends, and teams, and women who don’t spend their nights cataloging your injuries like that counts as intimacy.”

His expression shifted. Something in it sharpened with painful understanding.

You looked away too late.

“Oh,” he said.

You closed your eyes. “Don’t.”

He took one step closer. “Is that what this is?”

“No.”

“You’re upset because I kissed someone?”

“No.”

“No?”

You laughed once, softly and miserably. “I’m upset because you came home with her still on your mouth and asked me what was wrong.”

“Look at me.”

“No.”

“Please.”

That was worse. Dick rarely said “please” like that, careful and quiet, as if he knew he was asking for something you might not be ready to give.

You looked at him.

The red smear on his face was still there. His hair was windblown. There was a bruise forming beneath his jaw and a scratch near his temple. He was too familiar. Too beautiful. Too much the center of the life you had built around him without meaning to.

His voice softened. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

You laughed again, and this time it nearly broke. “Tell you what, Dick? That I get jealous when you date? That I can’t sleep until you come home? That sometimes you touch my back in the kitchen and I think about it for the rest of the day like I’m sixteen and pathetic? What exactly was I supposed to say?”

He stared at you as if you had put your hand through his chest and closed your fingers around his heart.

You wiped at your face angrily, even though you had not realized you were crying. “You’re my best friend.”

“I know.”

“You’re my family.”

“I know.”

“You’re the only permanent thing I’ve ever had.”

His face crumpled for half a second before he caught it. “I know.”

“So no, I didn’t tell you. Because wanting you like this feels selfish and dangerous, and I don’t know what happens to me if I ruin us.”

Dick moved then.

Not fast, not like Nightwing, not with the clean precision of a body trained for impact. He crossed the space between you carefully, as if approaching something wounded, and stopped close enough that you could see the unsteady rise of his chest.

“You think you could ruin us by loving me?”

The words hit so directly that you almost stepped back.

“You don’t have to say it like that.”

“How else am I supposed to say it?”

“Like it isn’t easy.”

“It’s not easy,” he said. “It’s just true.”

You went still.

Dick lifted his hand, then hesitated. That hesitation undid you more than the touch would have. He was asking. After years of casual closeness, after a lifetime of knowing your body in safe, familiar ways, he was asking permission to cross a line neither of you could uncross.

You nodded once.

His fingers touched your cheek.

“I didn’t know how to tell you either,” he said.

Your breath caught. “What?”

He smiled then, but it was a wrecked thing. “Yeah.”

“No.”

“Yeah.”

“Dick.”

“I know.” His thumb brushed beneath your eye. “I know, okay? I know I should’ve said something. I know I’m an idiot.”

“You dated other people.”

“I tried dating other people.”

“That is not better.”

“No,” he admitted. “It’s not. But every time I thought about telling you, I kept seeing you looking at me like I’d taken the only safe thing we had and made it complicated.”

“It is complicated.”

“Everything about us has always been complicated.”

You wanted to argue. You wanted to make him work for it. You wanted to hold on to the thin, miserable shield you had built out of practicality and fear.

Instead, you leaned into his hand.

Dick inhaled like it hurt.

“I don’t know when it changed,” he said quietly. “Maybe it didn’t. Maybe loving you was always there, and I just kept giving it different names because I was scared of wanting the one thing I couldn’t bear to lose.”

Your throat tightened.

“That’s not fair,” you whispered.

“I know.”

“You don’t get to say things like that with another woman’s lipstick on your lips.”

His eyes widened. For one absurd second, he looked almost panicked. Then he dragged the back of his hand over his lips and saw the red smear there.

“It was a goodbye kiss,” he said quickly. “After patrol. I ended it.”

“That is not better.”

“No,” he admitted. “It’s not. But she asked if there was someone else, and I said your name before I could think.”

Oh.

Your heart stumbled so hard it felt like falling.

“I ended it before I knew you felt this way,” he said. “I came home because I couldn’t keep pretending.”

Dick stepped closer, his hand sliding from your cheek to the side of your neck. “I came home to tell you.”

“You came home through the window.”

“I was nervous.”

“You’re Nightwing.”

“I’m still nervous.”

“You flirt with everyone.”

“Not like this.”

The room seemed smaller than it had been a few minutes ago. Warmer. The yellow cabinets, the stacked dishes, the half-open med kit on the counter, the city noise beyond the window. All the ordinary pieces of the life you had built together held their breath.

Dick’s eyes dropped to your mouth.

Your pulse jumped.

“Can I kiss you?” he asked.

You had imagined it before. Of course you had. Quietly, guiltily, in the dark, where wanting him could not hurt anyone but you. You had imagined smooth confidence, cinematic timing, some perfect version of yourself who knew exactly where to put her hands.

In reality, your voice shook.

“If you don’t, I’m going to be really embarrassed.”

Dick laughed, soft and breathless, and kissed you.

It was gentle for about two seconds.

Then your hand fisted in the front of his suit, and his restraint broke with a sound that went straight through you. He kissed like he had been starving for years. Like every almost had been stored somewhere under his skin and was now burning its way out. His mouth opened against yours, warm and desperate, and you made a helpless sound when his hand slid to your lower back and pulled you flush against him.

He froze instantly.

You almost cursed.

“Is this okay?” he asked, voice rough.

“Yes.”

“You’re sure?”

“Dick, I swear to God—”

He kissed you again before you could finish, smiling into it, and you hated how much you loved that you could feel the smile. Your hands slid over the armored lines of his suit, the same ones you had repaired so many times from the outside, and he shivered as if this were the first time you had ever touched him at all. 

When your fingers slid beneath the collar, his eyes went half-lidded, all that careful restraint thinning under your hands.

“You touch me all the time,” he murmured against your mouth. “Why does it feel different?”

“Because this time we’re allowed to want more.”

His eyes went dark.

The next kiss was deeper, slower, less frantic, and somehow more devastating. Dick backed you toward the counter until your hips hit the edge, then lifted you onto it with an ease that made heat pool low in your stomach. He stepped between your knees, and the shape of him there, broad and warm and familiar in an entirely unfamiliar way, nearly stole your breath.

You touched his face.

He turned his head and kissed your palm.

It was so tender that it hurt.

“Don’t be sweet right now,” you whispered.

His mouth curved. “Bossy.”

“I mean it. I’ll cry.”

“Okay.” He kissed the inside of your wrist. “I won’t be sweet.”

“You’re being sweet.”

“I’m trying to stop.”

“You’re bad at it.”

“I’ve had complaints.”

You pulled him back by the collar and kissed him until the teasing dissolved. His hands gripped your thighs, thumbs pressing slow circles through the fabric of your sleep shorts. You had worn them without thinking, one of his T-shirts and shorts, nothing meant to seduce anyone, but Dick looked at you like he was watching a miracle unfold in bad apartment lighting.

His gaze dragged down your body and returned to your face with visible effort.

“You’re killing me,” he said.

You laughed unsteadily. “I’m wearing old pajamas.”

“I know.”

“You’ve seen me in these a hundred times.”

“I know.”

“Dick.”

He leaned in, mouth brushing your jaw. “Do you have any idea how many times I’ve come home and seen you half-asleep in my shirts, or yelling at me with medical tape stuck to your hand, and had to remind myself not to do exactly this?”

His lips touched the side of your neck.

Your fingers tightened in his hair.

“Exactly what?”

He kissed beneath your ear. “Put my hands on you.”

Another kiss, lower.

“Take you apart.”

Your breath left you.

“Make you say my name like you’re not trying to hide it.”

“Dick.”

His grip flexed on your thighs. “Yeah. Like that.”

The room tilted. You had patched bullet grazes with steadier hands than you had now. Dick kissed down your throat with unbearable patience, and every place his mouth touched seemed to wake years of wanting beneath your skin. When his fingers slipped under the hem of your shirt, he paused again.

You pulled back enough to look at him. “I’ll tell you if I want to stop.”

His eyes searched yours. Whatever he saw there made his shoulders loosen.

“Okay.”

“And you’ll tell me.”

He nodded. “I’ll tell you.”

“Good.”

Then you lifted your arms.

Dick took your shirt off like he was trying to memorize the act. His eyes dropped, and for one vulnerable second, you almost crossed your arms over your chest. He caught the motion before you completed it, not by grabbing you, but by leaning down and pressing his mouth to the spot just above your heart.

Your hand settled in his hair.

“Beautiful,” he said against your skin.

You closed your eyes. “That sounds sweet.”

“Then I’m bad at following instructions.”

His mouth moved lower, and your laugh turned into a gasp.

Dick Grayson, as it turned out, applied the same focus to taking you apart that he applied to everything else he truly cared about. He learned quickly. Too quickly. His mouth found your breast, tongue circling your nipple before he sucked gently, and pleasure sparked so sharply through you that your knees tightened around his hips.

He groaned.

That sound changed something in you.

You reached for the closures of his suit with hands that only shook a little, and he helped you because he knew the damn thing better than you did, peeling it down from his shoulders and letting it gather at his waist. You had seen him shirtless more times than you could count. Injured. Tired. Fresh from the shower. Half-asleep at the stove. This was different because you were allowed to look, and because he was looking back.

There were bruises on him. There were always bruises.

You touched one near his ribs, and the old instinct rose immediately. “This is new.”

Dick looked down. “Pipe.”

“Pipe?”

“Bad guy had a pipe.”

“Descriptive.”

“I was distracted.”

“By the pipe?”

“By wanting to come home to you.”

Your fingers stilled.

He covered your hand with his. “Too sweet?”

“Dangerously.”

His smile softened, then faded when you leaned forward and kissed the bruise with featherlight care. His breathing changed. You kissed another mark, then another, mapping the evidence of violence with your mouth until his hand slid into your hair and held there without pushing.

“You’ve been doing this for years,” he said quietly.

“What?”

“Putting me back together.”

You looked up at him. “You always came back in pieces.”

“I always come back to you.”

The words settled between you, heavy and certain.

Then you kissed him again because there were some truths too large to answer any other way.

He carried you to the bedroom.

You were grateful for that, because your legs had become theoretical somewhere between the counter and his mouth on your neck. He lay you down on the bed you had forced him to share the room with, one knee sinking into the mattress beside your hip. For a second, you both looked at the other bed across the narrow space and laughed.

“This room is ridiculous,” you said.

“Our whole life is ridiculous.”

“You’re still half in the suit.”

“That seems fixable.”

It was. Barely. There was a deeply ungraceful moment involving one boot, a curse, and you nearly getting hit in the shin by a knee pad, but then Dick was in his briefs above you, laughing into your shoulder, and the last of your fear loosened its grip.

This was still Dick.

The man you wanted, yes, but also the boy who had stolen sugared almonds with you. The teenager who had bled on your bedspread. The man who forgot to buy dish soap and remembered the anniversary of every terrible thing without you having to say it aloud.

He kissed your shoulder. “Hi.”

You turned your face toward him. “Hi.”

“You still with me?”

“Unfortunately.”

He grinned. “There she is.”

You pushed at his chest, and he caught your hand, kissing your knuckles before pinning it gently beside your head. The shift was subtle, but your body noticed. Heat curled through you as he lowered himself over you, not resting his full weight, just enough to make you feel surrounded.

“You like that?” he asked.

Your face warmed.

His expression changed, not smug exactly, but attentive. Interested. “Oh.”

“Don’t sound so pleased.”

“I’m learning.”

“You’re insufferable.”

“I’ve also had complaints about that.”

You rolled your hips up, just slightly, and his words cut off.

That was satisfying.

Dick looked down at you, eyes dark and mouth parted, and then his hand slid down your body with purpose. Over your ribs, your waist, the soft give of your stomach, stopping at the waistband of your shorts.

He waited.

Your voice came out quieter than you intended. “Yes.”

He kissed you as he pulled them down, and you were glad for it because it gave you something to do with the sudden rush of vulnerability. His hand smoothed over your thigh. He murmured something against your mouth, not quite words, maybe your name, maybe a prayer, and then his fingers slipped between your legs.

You both went still.

You, because the first careful stroke through your wetness made your whole body tighten.

Dick because he felt it.

“Fuck,” he breathed.

You tried to laugh. It came out ruined. “Observant.”

“You’re wet.”

“Again. Observant.”

“For me?”

You opened your eyes. “Who else is in the room, Grayson?”

The look he gave you then was not sweet at all.

He lowered himself down your body, kissing a path over your stomach, your hip, the inside of your thigh. Your breath caught when he settled between your legs, broad shoulders spreading them wider. He looked up at you from there, hair falling over his forehead, mouth kiss-swollen, eyes so blue and intent that you nearly lost your nerve.

“We don’t have to,” he said.

“I know.”

“I want to.”

“I know.”

His hands held your thighs, thumbs stroking once. “Tell me I can.”

The words landed low and hot.

“You can.”

Dick kissed the inside of your thigh.

Then his mouth was on you.

Your head fell back against the pillow. It had been years of yearning, years of telling yourself that the ache was survivable because it had to be, and none of it prepared you for the reality of Dick between your legs, licking into you with a soft groan like he was the one being undone. His tongue moved slowly at first, exploratory, learning what made your breath hitch and your fingers twist in the sheets. Then he found your clit, and your hips jerked.

He made a pleased sound that vibrated through you.

“Dick.”

He looked up without stopping.

The sight of his blue eyes so dilated you could barely see the pretty color nearly finished you on its own.

One of your hands flew to his hair, and he leaned into the grip, eyes fluttering for half a second before his focus sharpened again. He slipped one hand from your thigh and pressed a finger inside you, careful and slow, watching your face as your mouth fell open.

“Okay?” he asked.

“Yes.”

He added his mouth again, and language became difficult.

Dick had always been a performer, but this was not performance. This was attention. This was devotion turned physical. He listened to every breath, every movement, every broken sound you tried to swallow. When he curled his finger and found the place that made your back arch, he did it again, then again, mouth working over your clit until pleasure gathered fast and bright beneath your skin.

You tugged his hair. “I’m close.”

His eyes lifted to yours.

He did not stop.

The orgasm broke over you hard enough to shock you, your body tightening around his finger as you gasped his name. He held you through it, mouth gentling but not leaving, drawing out the aftershocks until you had to push weakly at his shoulder.

He climbed back up your body with a look on his face that could have ruined your life in any context.

“You look proud of yourself,” you managed.

“I’m trying to be humble.”

“You’re failing.”

“I know.”

You kissed him and tasted yourself on his mouth, which should have embarrassed you more than it did. Instead, it made you want him with a sudden, aching intensity that left no room for fear.

Your hand slid down his stomach.

Dick’s breath caught when you palmed him through his briefs. He was hard, hot and heavy against your hand, and his hips pressed forward before he caught himself.

“Sorry,” he said roughly.

You kissed his jaw. “Don’t be.”

His forehead dropped to your shoulder. “I’m trying very hard to be good.”

Something tender and wicked moved through you.

“You are good.”

He shuddered.

“Oh,” you whispered. “You like that.”

He laughed into your skin, embarrassed and turned on and so painfully Dick that your heart squeezed. “Shut up.”

“You do.”

“I’m not above begging.”

Heat flooded you. “That was not the deterrent you thought it was.”

He lifted his head, and the humor between you stretched thin under the wanting. You pushed his briefs down as far as you could reach, and he finished the job with shaking hands. When he settled between your thighs again, bare this time, the feel of him against you stole the teasing from both of your mouths.

Dick kissed you once. Then again.

“We should use a condom,” he said, sounding like the words had physically pained him.

“I have an IUD.”

His eyes closed. “That information is going to kill me.”

“We can still use one.”

“No, I mean yes, if you want, obviously, but if you’re saying—”

“I’m saying I want to feel you.”

He made a sound you had never heard from him before.

Your hands slid up his back. “Is that okay?”

He looked at you, and all the humor, all the heat, all the years of almost seemed to settle into something frighteningly honest.

“Yeah,” he said. “That’s okay.”

He reached between you, guiding himself against you, and paused with the head of his cock just barely pressing inside. Your fingers dug into his shoulders. He watched your face, jaw tight, holding himself back so carefully that you could feel the tremor in his arms.

“Breathe,” he whispered.

You laughed unsteadily. “That’s usually my line.”

“I learned from the best.”

Then he pushed in.

Slowly. Carefully. Inch by inch until the stretch of him filled every thought you had. Your eyes burned, not from pain exactly, though there was an edge of that, but from the sheer intimacy of it. Dick above you, inside you, his forehead pressed to yours, his breath shaking as badly as yours.

He stopped when his hips met yours.

For a moment, neither of you moved.

The city sounded distant beyond the window. A siren somewhere. A car passing below. The old pipes complaining in the walls. Ordinary things continuing while your whole life rearranged itself around the feeling of him buried inside you.

Dick’s voice was rough. “Tell me you’re okay.”

You turned your head and kissed his wrist where his hand braced beside you. “I’m okay.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

He moved then, a slow drag out and back in that made your nails scrape down his back. His control faltered. You felt it in the way his hips stuttered, in the low sound he pressed into your neck.

“Sorry,” he gasped.

“If you apologize one more time, I’m kicking you out of bed.”

He laughed breathlessly. “That would be awkward.”

“You’re inside me. Everything is awkward.”

“Not everything.”

Then he moved again, and you had to concede the point.

It did not stay slow for long. Maybe it could not have, not with years behind it, not with both of you already stripped raw by confession before anyone took off their clothes. Dick found a rhythm that made your body arch into his, each thrust deep and deliberate, his mouth moving over every part of you he could reach. Your shoulder. Your throat. Your jaw. The corner of your mouth when you turned your face away because the pleasure was too much.

“No,” he murmured. “Don’t hide.”

“I’m not.”

“You are.” He kissed you, hips rolling into yours until your breath broke. “I want to hear you.”

You moaned before you could stop yourself.

Dick’s composure cracked.

“God,” he said, and then he was fucking you harder, one hand sliding beneath your thigh to hitch it higher against his hip. The new angle made you cry out, and he cursed, pressing his forehead into the pillow beside your head.

“Again,” he said.

You were not sure whether he meant the sound or the movement. It did not matter. You gave him both.

The second orgasm built slower than the first, deeper, tied to the drag of him inside you and the weight of his body over yours. You could feel him losing control by degrees, his breathing rough, his praise turning fragmented against your skin.

“Good,” he murmured. “You feel so good. You’re so good for me. Wanted this so long, you have no idea.”

Your body clenched around him.

His hips stuttered. “Fuck. Do that again.”

“I didn’t do it on purpose.”

“I don’t care. Do it again. Please.”

You laughed, and the laugh became a moan when he slipped a hand between you and found your clit. The pleasure sharpened instantly, almost too much, and you grabbed his wrist.

“Dick.”

“I’ve got you.”

“You always say that.”

“I always mean it.”

That was what undid you.

You came with his name in your mouth, your body tightening around him as he thrust through it, face buried in your neck. He lasted another few seconds, and then he groaned, deep and helpless, and came inside you, his whole body shuddering with the force of it.

Afterward, he did not move for a long time.

You did not ask him to.

His weight was warm and grounding, his heartbeat racing against yours. Your fingers drifted up and down his spine, feeling the old scars, the new bruises, the sweat cooling on his skin. Eventually, he lifted his head enough to look at you.

His hair was a disaster. His eyes were soft.

Your heart hurt.

“Hi,” he said again, softer this time.

You smiled. “You keep saying that.”

“I keep finding you here.”

The words were quiet enough to pass for teasing if you let them.

You did not.

“I’m here,” you said.

His expression shifted. He kissed you once, gentle and lingering, then carefully eased out of you. You hissed softly, and he immediately looked alarmed.

“I’m okay,” you said.

“I’ll get a washcloth.”

“Dick.”

“And water.”

“Dick.”

“And maybe—”

You caught his hand before he could launch himself into post-sex triage like a man possessed. “In a minute.”

He looked down at you, then at your joined hands.

Some of the panic faded.

He lay beside you instead, gathering you in carefully, as if tenderness could bruise if handled incorrectly. You tucked your face against his chest. His hand moved over your hair, slow and reverent.

The other bed sat across the room, empty and ridiculous.

You laughed softly.

“What?” he asked.

“We should just get a bigger bed.”

His chest shook beneath your cheek. “Mrs. Alvarez will be thrilled.”

“She’ll say she knew this would happen.”

“She did know this would happen.”

“Everyone knew this would happen.”

Dick kissed the top of your head, still laughing. “Everyone, apparently, except us.”

You pinched his side. He yelped, then caught your hand and held it against his heart.

Quiet settled again.

Not the manor’s quiet. Not the stunned silence of a circus tent after tragedy. This quiet was smaller. Warmer. Chosen.

Dick’s fingers traced idle shapes over your wrist. “Were you really going to leave?”

You closed your eyes.

“No.”

His breath left him slowly.

“I thought about it,” you admitted. “For maybe five horrible minutes. I thought if I left first, then at least I’d be choosing it.”

His arm tightened around you.

“I don’t want to be another thing you feel responsible for,” you said.

“You’re not.”

“I know you say that.”

“No.” He shifted, making you look at him. “Listen to me. You are not here because I can’t survive without you.”

Your throat tightened despite yourself.

Dick brushed his thumb over your cheek. “I probably could. I’d be worse at it. Miserable. Badly fed. Much more concussed.”

“Obviously.”

“But I don’t love you because I need a medic. I don’t love you because you came with me from the circus, or because you know what it was like before, or because you stayed.”

You swallowed. “Then why?”

He smiled, small and certain.

“Because it’s you.”

The answer was too simple for how much it hurt.

You pressed your face into his chest before he could see everything it did to you. He held you through it anyway, because of course he did.

Dick had always caught you, even when neither of you knew who was falling.

Much later, after he had finally gotten the washcloth and water and fussed enough to satisfy whatever part of him needed to be useful, you ended up tangled together beneath the sheets. Your leg was hooked over his. His hand rested on your hip. The apartment was cooling around you, the city beyond the window still restless, still dangerous, still waiting.

Nothing was fixed.

Bruce would be insufferable in his silence. Alfred would know before anyone told him. Barbara would say something devastatingly mild. Jason would never let either of you live it down. Blüdhaven would still bruise Dick and send him home bleeding. You would still worry. He would still leap before looking. The past would still be there, stitched into both of you, old grief under new skin.

When you opened your eyes, Dick was looking at you like he had, after everything, still ended up exactly where he was supposed to be.

“You know,” he said, voice rough with exhaustion and mischief, “technically, I refused to leave you behind first.”

You narrowed your eyes. “Are you trying to claim credit for our entire relationship?”

“I’m just saying, I had good instincts when I refused to leave without you.”

“You were grieving and concussed.”

“Emotionally concussed, maybe.”

“You also thought your Robin costume was subtle.”

“It was iconic.”

“It was traffic-light cosplay.”

He gasped. “Take that back.”

“No.”

“You wound me.”

“I know how to patch you up.”

His smile softened until the joke became something else. He leaned in and kissed you, slow and sleepy and certain.

When he pulled back, his forehead rested against yours.

“You’re my home,” he whispered.

You had been a child left at the edge of a circus with no name anyone could give you. You had been a girl in the sawdust, holding on to a boy whose grief matched yours closely enough to cut. You had been a shadow in Wayne Manor, a pair of hands in the Cave, a woman in a cramped Blüdhaven apartment pretending that waiting was not another word for love.

You had followed Dick Grayson through every version of himself.

Robin. Nightwing. Best friend. Roommate. The boy who refused to leave you. The man who came back to you.

You kissed him once, softly, and felt him breathe you in.

“Then stop leaving your suit on the bathroom floor,” you said.

Dick laughed, bright and helpless, and pulled you closer.

On the worst day of your life, the sky above Central City split open in red and gold.

You were in the basement archives of the Central City Museum when the alarms started screaming. The storage wing was supposed to be secure against fire, flood, theft, and most ordinary forms of metahuman disaster. That was what the trustees said during fundraisers, anyway, usually while standing near glass cases full of artifacts that had survived wars, dynasties, and colonial looting only to be entrusted to a building with questionable wiring and a gift shop shaped like a lightning bolt.

You had been cataloging damaged objects from the last superhero incident when the lights flickered once.

Then again.

Then the room bent.

There was no better word for it. The walls did not shake. The floor did not crack at first. Reality folded inward like someone had gripped the edges of the world and pulled too hard. The archive shelves stretched long, then snapped back into place. A bronze helmet on your table aged green and copper and green again in the space of a second. Your phone flashed through dates too quickly to read.

You heard yourself breathe in.

You did not hear yourself breathe out.

The air turned electric. Every hair on your arms lifted. Somewhere above you, people shouted. Somewhere much closer, something bright and violent punched through the ceiling.

Lightning hit the floor in front of you.

It should have killed you. You had enough time to know that. You saw the white-gold flare, smelled ozone and burning dust, felt the impossible heat open in the air, and understood in the small, clear part of your mind that survived panic that your body was standing directly in the path of something it could not endure.

Then a hand caught your wrist.

The world stopped.

Not slowed. Not quieted. Stopped.

A shard of ceiling hung in the air six inches from your face. Papers floated around you, frozen mid-whirl. The red emergency lights held between flashes, staining everything in a suspended pulse. Your breath was halfway out of your chest and would not move.

The only thing alive in the room was the man holding your wrist.

He was dressed in red. That was your first thought, stupidly ordinary against the impossible. Red suit, gold lightning, hair like copper under the emergency lights, face smudged with soot and blood at his temple. You knew who he was in the vague way everyone in Central City knew who he was. The Flash. Wally West. Hero, menace, headline, beloved civic hazard.

Except he was looking at you like you were not vague to him at all.

His grip tightened around your wrist. His eyes moved over your face with such raw relief that your fear briefly lost its shape.

“Oh, thank God,” he breathed.

You stared at him.

He said your name.

Not a question. Not a guess. He said it the way someone said a prayer after surviving the answer.

Your stomach dropped. “How do you know my name?”

Wally’s expression changed. Grief crossed it so quickly you might have missed it if the whole world had not been holding still around you. He looked older than the photos you had seen of him, not much, maybe a year or two, but exhaustion had carved something sharp into the brightness of his face. There was blood on his mouth. His suit was torn at the shoulder. One of his hands was trembling.

“You’re early,” he said.

“For what?”

His smile broke before it became anything useful. “For me.”

The ceiling moved half an inch.

Wally looked up sharply. The lightning around him flared, throwing gold across the frozen wreckage. You felt the air press against your skin, time straining to resume.

“Listen to me,” he said, too quickly now. “You’re going to get out of here. Captain Singh is going to ask you what happened, and you’re going to tell him the truth.”

“The truth is that the Flash knows my name and the ceiling froze.”

“Yeah.” His mouth twitched with something too wounded to be humor. “Maybe soften the delivery.”

“Wally.”

His eyes snapped back to yours.

You had not meant to say it like that. You had not meant to say it at all. His name came out frightened, intimate, shaped around a future you did not have.

For one impossible second, he looked ruined by the sound.

Then he reached for you.

You should have pulled away. He was a stranger wearing a hero’s face, standing in a broken second, blood on his lips and your name in his mouth. Every reasonable instinct in your body should have rejected his touch. Instead, you stood there as his fingers brushed your cheek with devastating care.

He touched you like he had done it before.

He touched you like he was trying to remember how it felt.

“Don’t let me run from you,” he said.

Your throat tightened. “What does that mean?”

The ceiling gave another inch. Sound rushed back in at the edges of the room, a low roar dragging the world toward motion.

Wally caught your hand, lifted it, and pressed his mouth to your knuckles.

It was not a flirtation. It was not charming. It was the saddest kiss you had ever received, and it lasted barely long enough to become real.

Then he pushed you behind him, and the world exploded.

You remembered speed after that. A blur of red. Gold lightning. His arm around your waist. Heat, then cold, then the brutal slap of the evening air as you landed on the sidewalk outside the museum, sirens wailing around you. People screamed. Glass rained down behind police barricades. Someone wrapped a blanket around your shoulders. Someone else asked if you were hurt.

You looked down at your hand.

Your knuckles still tingled.

By the time you looked up, Wally West was gone.

Displacement

Six months after the museum basement, Wally West ran into you again by accident.

For him, that was all it was.

For you, it was the second time the fastest man alive had ruined your day.

It was good coffee, too. It was a splurge for you, from the place that was twice as expensive as every other coffee shop in the area. That was the part you resented most in the first three seconds before you looked up and saw him standing in front of you with two empty cups, one horrified expression, and the kind of face that made women with coffee spilled on them forgive the spill as a reflex.

“Oh my God,” he said. “I am so sorry. I swear I usually have better hand-eye coordination. Like, professionally better. Historically better. Statistically, this is an outlier.”

You stared at the brown stain spreading across the tops of your shoes.

He continued, “I can buy you new ones. Or pay for cleaning. Do people clean shoes? That sounds fake. I can Google it. I can also stop talking, which is probably the strongest option on the table right now.”

You looked at his face.

The effect was immediate and deeply inconvenient.

You knew him.

You knew the slope of his nose, the line of his mouth, the warm copper of his hair. You knew the way his eyes went soft around your name before he said it. You knew what his hand felt like around your wrist. You knew what his mouth felt like on your knuckles.

Except this Wally was not wrecked. He was not bleeding, older-eyed, or standing in a frozen disaster with lightning tearing apart the world. He was bright and sheepish and painfully alive under the warm lights of a Central City coffee shop. His hoodie was yellow. His sneakers were red. He had whipped cream on one knuckle and no idea who you were.

Your heart forgot how time worked before you knew what kind of lightning could split a life in two.

“Are you okay?” he asked, smile dimming. “Did I burn you?”

“No,” you said.

“Okay. Good. Good, that’s good. Your shoes may never forgive me, but skin is the priority.”

You should have laughed. He was trying for it. Everything about him seemed designed to pull humor from disaster before anyone could panic. His mouth tilted hopefully, as if he had spent his whole life learning that a grin was useful armor.

Instead, you said, “Do I know you?”

Wally blinked. “I feel like I’d remember that.”

Your throat felt tight. “Would you?”

Something flickered across his face. It was small, almost nothing, but for the first time since he had crashed into you, he looked less like a man apologizing over coffee and more like a hero who had heard the wrong note in a familiar room.

“I’m Wally,” he said carefully.

“I know.”

His eyebrows rose. “Cool. Usually flattering. Slightly ominous in context.”

You gave him your name.

Nothing happened.

That was the cruel part. No lightning. No recognition. No break in the air. He only smiled, warm and easy, and repeated it once as if he were testing the shape of it.

It sounded nothing like the way he had said it with blood on his mouth and the world falling apart around you.

You hated him a little for that.

“Well,” he said, recovering with a speed that felt unfairly on-brand, “since I ruined your shoes and possibly your morning, can I replace the coffee I also ruined? I promise the second attempt comes with at least forty percent less property damage.”

You looked down at your shoes again because his face was too much.

“I’m late for work.”

“Right. Museum, yeah?”

Your gaze snapped up.

Wally froze.

For half a second, neither of you spoke.

Then he pointed weakly at the lanyard around your neck. “Badge. Your badge says Central City Museum. I am observant in a normal, non-creepy way.”

You looked down. Your badge was turned outward, your name and department visible under the museum logo.

For him, it was an explanation.

For you, it was a warning shot.

“Right,” you said.

“Yeah.”

“Sorry.”

“No, totally fair. I did just attack you with coffee.”

You stepped around him, careful not to brush his shoulder. “Have a nice day, Wally.”

“You too,” he called after you. Then, because apparently he was incapable of letting a moment end gracefully, “And seriously, about the shoes. I’m good for it. I have a job. Several, depending on how you define tax fraud.”

You did laugh then, unwillingly, once, and hated him more for making it happen.

When you glanced back through the window, he was still watching you with his head tilted, as if trying to figure out why a stranger’s almost-smile felt like something he had been waiting for.

Afterimage

The next time Wally West entered your life, he was two months ahead and bleeding on your fire escape.

You were not proud of the noise you made.

To be fair, it was two in the morning. You were asleep. There was a thunderstorm shaking rain against the glass, and your apartment was on the fifth floor. A person appearing on your fire escape under those conditions deserved whatever unflattering sound came out of your mouth when you woke to knuckles tapping against the pane.

Wally waved weakly through the window.

He was bleeding.

You sat upright so fast your blanket tangled around your legs. For one disorienting second, your mind tried to reconcile too many versions of him at once. Coffee-shop Wally, grinning and careless. Museum Wally, bloody and heartbroken. This Wally, soaked to the skin, one hand pressed to his ribs, looking almost embarrassed to be dying outside your apartment.

You opened the window.

Rain blew in immediately.

“What the hell?” you demanded.

“Hi,” he said. “Funny story.”

“You’re bleeding on my fire escape.”

“Yeah, that’s the less funny part.”

You grabbed his arm and pulled. He could have made it easy. You knew that even if you did not yet understand the full physics of him. He could have been inside before your hand closed around his wrist. Instead, he let you haul him awkwardly through the window like a normal person, all long limbs and wet fabric and a pained hiss when his side hit the sill.

He landed on your bedroom floor and looked around.

“Huh,” he said.

You stood over him as he dripped rainwater onto your rug. “Huh?”

“Your room is different.”

Your blood went cold.

Not nice. Not small. Not messy. Different.

As if he had seen it before.

As if he had seen another version of it before.

Wally seemed to realize what he had said at the same time you did. His eyes lifted to yours, and the boyishness drained out of his face.

“You know this room,” you said.

His mouth parted.

“You know me.”

He did not deny it.

Not coffee-shop knew you. Not flirted-over-ruined-shoes knew you. This Wally knew where you kept your books. This Wally had seen your bedroom before. This Wally looked at you and forgot, for half a second, that you might not be the same you who had let him in last time.

“When are you from?” you asked.

The question should have sounded insane. Instead, after the museum basement, after the frozen ceiling, after his mouth on your knuckles and your name in his mouth, it felt like the only one left.

Wally pushed himself up against the side of your bed, one hand still pressed to his ribs. “What’s the date?”

You told him.

He closed his eyes. “Damn it.”

“Wally.”

“Two months ahead,” he said. “For me. I’m two months ahead of you.”

Your apartment seemed too small around the answer. Rain tapped hard against the window. The yellow light from your bedside lamp made him look almost human, except for the faint static crawling over his skin and the way the air shimmered around him like heat over pavement.

You grabbed the first-aid kit from your bathroom with hands that shook only after you turned away.

When you came back, he had managed to unzip the top half of his suit. There was a long, ugly cut along his ribs, already healing too quickly at the edges. You crouched beside him, opened the kit, and tried not to think about the fact that his body knew how to recover from things that would have put anyone else in an ambulance.

“You should go to a hospital.”

“Speedster metabolism.” He gave you a strained smile. “By the time they get a doctor in, I’d be healed and starving enough to eat the tongue depressors.”

“Do not try to be charming while bleeding.”

“That wasn’t trying. That was medical trivia with charm.”

You pressed gauze to his side.

He inhaled sharply. His hand shot out and caught your wrist, not hard enough to hurt, but hard enough to stop you. The contact flashed through you: his hand in the museum, his mouth on your knuckles, his voice telling you not to let him run.

Wally’s gaze dropped to where he was touching you.

He let go immediately.

“Sorry,” he said.

You kept the gauze in place. “What happens?”

His face tightened.

“With us,” you clarified, because apparently you had reached a point in your life where that was the simpler question. “What happens with us that you know my apartment?”

Wally leaned his head back against the bed. For once, he did not have a joke ready. The absence of one felt worse.

“We become friends,” he said.

You waited.

His smile was faint and pained. “You learn when I’m lying by omission.”

“That fast?”

“You’re really annoying about it.”

You pressed harder against the wound. “You broke into my apartment bleeding from the future.”

“Technically, I knocked.”

“Wally.”

His eyes found yours.

There was too much in them. That was the recurring problem with him. Present-day Wally had too little history with you. Future-Wally had too much. Neither version seemed capable of standing in front of you without making your chest ache.

“We don’t have the whole story,” he said softly. “Either of us. I remember things you haven’t done yet. You know things about me I haven’t told you yet. The Speed Force is…it’s looping something around us, and I don’t know why.”

“Can you fix it?”

Wally looked away.

That was answer enough.

You taped the gauze down in silence. His breathing steadied under your hands, but the room did not feel calmer. If anything, the quiet made him more dangerous. Wally West moving was a spectacle. Wally West not moving was intimate in a way you did not know how to defend against.

When you finished, he looked down at the bandage, then back at you.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“For bleeding on my rug?”

“For all of it.” His voice thinned. “For whatever version of me you met first.”

You thought of lightning. His hand on your cheek. The unbearable tenderness of his mouth against your hand.

“He was sad,” you said.

Wally swallowed. “Yeah?”

“He looked at me like losing me had already happened.”

For a moment, the only sound was rain.

Then Wally said, very quietly, “That sounds like me.”

You did not know what to do with that.

So you set the bloody gauze aside, sat back on your heels, and made the first rule before time could take anything else from you.

“No using things I haven’t told you yet.”

Wally’s eyes sharpened.

You held his gaze. “If you remember things we do later, that doesn’t mean this version of me has agreed to them now. You don’t get to assume I want something because another version of me wanted it. You don’t get to skip ahead.”

His expression shifted with every sentence, the charm falling away piece by piece until only the man underneath remained.

“That sounds fair,” he said.

“No,” you said. “It’s necessary.”

Wally nodded once.

The air between you changed. It did not get less charged. If anything, the boundary made the charge worse because he understood it, because he did not argue, because he looked at you as if the rule hurt and relieved him at the same time.

“Okay,” he said. “No skipping ahead.”

You believed him because some part of you already knew that trusting Wally West would hurt, and that it might be worth it anyway.

Echo

The first time future-Wally appeared in your apartment without bleeding on anything, he was standing in your living room at dawn.

You found him because you had woken to the sound of your kettle turning on.

For a few seconds, your half-asleep mind tried to make the noise ordinary. Pipes, maybe. A neighbor. The old radiator knocking awake even though it was barely cold outside. Then you remembered you did not own a kettle with an automatic setting, and your body went still beneath the blankets.

You reached for the baseball bat beside your bed.

By the time you stepped into the hallway, future-Wally was already looking at you.

He stood in the dim blue-gray light near your kitchen counter, hair damp from rain that had not fallen in your timeline yet. His suit was scuffed but intact, mask pushed back, one hand braced beside the stove as if he had needed the counter to keep himself upright. The kettle clicked off behind him.

He looked at the bat in your hand.

His mouth twitched. “That’s new.”

You tightened your grip. “For me, or for you?”

The almost-smile vanished.

“For me,” he said.

That should have comforted you. It did not. Every time he knew something, the room tilted. Every time he did not, it hurt in a different direction.

He looked away from you and toward the mug sitting beside the stove. It was one of yours, chipped along the rim, a museum gift shop mug with a faded print of an ancient coin on the side. You had bought it years ago because it had been mispriced and ugly enough to make you laugh. Wally touched the handle with one finger, then drew his hand back before he could pick it up.

You noticed.

“You know that mug,” you said.

His eyes closed.

“Wally.”

“I know where you keep the tea,” he said, and his voice was too rough for something so small. “I know which mug you use when you can’t sleep. I know you hate when people leave spoons in the sink, but you do it all the time when you’re upset. I know there’s a blanket in the bottom drawer of your TV stand because you always say the couch is colder than it looks.”

Your hand lowered slightly around the bat.

He laughed once, without humor. “I also know I’m not supposed to know any of that yet.”

The apartment felt suddenly too full. Too lived-in. As if another version of you had already walked through it with him, already made room for him, already let him learn the quiet things nobody learned by accident.

“Are we together where you’re from?” you asked.

Wally’s face changed.

The answer was there before he refused to give it.

“I’m not allowed to answer that,” he said.

“You’re not allowed?”

“You made rules.”

“I made one rule.”

“You make more.” His mouth softened around the words, fondness slipping through before he could stop it. “You get very specific when you’re angry.”

You should not have liked knowing that. You should not have wanted the shape of those future arguments, the proof that you knew him well enough someday to be furious with precision. Instead, you stood in your own hallway with a baseball bat in your hand and felt jealousy move through you for a version of yourself who had already survived his closeness.

Wally looked at the bat again. “You should put that down before I say something stupid and deserve it.”

“You usually deserve it?”

“More often than I’d like.”

You leaned the bat against the wall, but you did not move closer. He watched the choice as if he understood every inch of distance between you and hated himself for recognizing it.

“What are you doing here?” you asked.

“I don’t know.” His eyes flicked toward the window, where early morning pressed pale and thin against the glass. “That’s a bad answer. I was running, and then I was here.”

“Running from what?”

He smiled faintly. “You’re going to hate the pattern.”

“Wally.”

“Consequences,” he said.

The word landed heavily.

He rubbed a hand over his face. For the first time, you saw how tired he really was. Not sleepy. Not bruised from one fight. Tired in a way that looked worn into him, like his body had healed too many times around the same wound.

“You need to listen to me,” he said.

You folded your arms. “Historically, that has not gone well.”

“I know.” His gaze came back to yours, sharp with urgency now. “That’s what I’m trying to tell you. If I show up and tell you not to go somewhere, don’t listen unless I tell you why.”

You stared at him.

He took one step toward you, then stopped himself. The restraint looked physical.

“Don’t let me turn fear into instructions,” he said. “Don’t let me make your choices and call it protection. I promised you I’d stop doing that.”

Your throat tightened.

“When?”

His face twisted.

“Later,” he said.

“That is a terrible answer.”

“It’s the only one I can give without making it worse.”

You almost laughed at that because the damage was already impossible to measure. Your kitchen smelled like hot water and ozone. Your mug sat untouched on the counter. Wally West stood in front of you like a man haunting a home he had not yet been invited into.

“Did you keep the promise?” you asked.

He looked at you for a long moment.

Then his expression broke.

“I’m trying,” he said.

That was when you understood that trying was not the same as succeeding.

Lightning crawled over his shoulders. He looked down at himself, jaw tightening, and you knew he was about to vanish because every version of him left before you could ask the question that mattered most.

You said his name anyway.

He looked up.

For half a second, the grief on his face became unbearable.

“Don’t let me run from you,” he said.

Then he was gone.

The kettle sat cooling on the counter. The mug stayed empty beside it.

You stood in the hallway until the dawn had finished brightening your apartment, thinking about promises made in a future you had not reached and broken by a man who still looked at you as if he were trying to save you from loving him.

Friction

Wally West was jealous of himself.

He tried to hide it, which was funny for about five minutes and then awful for much longer.

You saw it the first time future-Wally appeared in your kitchen while present-Wally was standing three feet away, eating cereal from a mug because you had not done the dishes that week. One second, present-Wally was talking too quickly about a fight with Mirror Master that had somehow involved a duck boat, three confused tourists, and a churro stand. The next, lightning snapped across your kitchen tile, and another Wally was there.

This one looked exhausted.

He was wearing the suit, mask gone, hair damp with sweat. There was ash on his cheek. His gaze swept the room, found you, and softened so intensely that present-Wally stopped mid-sentence.

“Oh,” future-Wally said.

Present-Wally’s spoon lowered. “Oh?”

Future-Wally glanced at him, then winced. “This is a bad one.”

“You think?” present-Wally asked.

You gripped the edge of the counter. “When are you from?”

Future-Wally looked back at you. “Two months after the fire escape.”

“I hate that that made sense to me,” you said.

He smiled, and the familiarity of it hurt.

Then he stepped toward you.

Present-Wally moved first.

It was barely a movement, more instinct than decision. A blur of red-gold, and he was between you and himself, shoulders tense. Future-Wally stopped immediately. Something passed between them that you could not read, except that both of them looked wounded by it.

“Relax,” future-Wally said softly. “I’m not here for that.”

“Then what?” present-Wally demanded.

Future-Wally’s eyes flicked to yours.

You knew before he said anything that the answer belonged to a version of you who had already lived something this kitchen had not reached.

Present-Wally knew it too.

His jaw tightened. “Right.”

“Wally,” you said.

Both of them looked at you.

You closed your eyes. “That is horrible.”

Future-Wally laughed once, tired and fond. Present-Wally looked like he wanted to punch him, which would have been more satisfying if the logistics had made any sense.

The future version did not stay long. He never did. That was another cruelty you started cataloging without meaning to. Future-Wally appeared like grief given a body, dropped an impossible warning, looked at you as if the sight of you were water in a desert, and vanished before you could decide whether you were angry or relieved.

This one was worse than the version of him who had stood in your kitchen at dawn and told you not to trust warnings without explanations. That Wally had still been trying to warn you against himself. This one looked like something had snapped between then and now. Like fear had finally taught him to ignore his own warning.

This time, he only said, “Don’t go to the museum gala next week.”

You stared at him. “Why?”

“Because I asked you to.”

Present-Wally made a sharp sound. “Absolutely not.”

Future-Wally’s face twisted. “You don’t know what happens.”

“No, I don’t, because you’re doing the dramatic, cryptic time-traveler thing instead of using your words like someone who has met another person before.”

“You think I haven’t tried?”

“I think you’re scaring her.”

Future-Wally flinched.

The kitchen went quiet.

He looked at you again, and the grief was back, older than the rest of him. “Please,” he said.

You hated that most. Not the warning. Not the fear. The please.

Then lightning crawled over his body. He looked at present-Wally. “Don’t make the choice for her.”

Present-Wally’s anger faltered.

Future-Wally vanished.

The cereal mug cracked in present-Wally’s hand.

Neither of you moved for a long moment. Then Wally looked down, cursed, and set the broken mug in the sink.

“I’ll buy you a new one,” he said.

“You say that a lot.”

“I break a lot of things.”

You leaned back against the counter. “I’m going to the gala.”

Wally nodded immediately. “I know.”

“You don’t get to tell me not to.”

“I know that too.”

“Even if he is you.”

“Especially if he’s me.”

That made something in your chest loosen, which was unfair because you were still angry. Wally looked at you with his hands braced on the sink, eyes too bright, mouth pressed into a line as if he was physically holding back every terrified thing he wanted to say.

Then, because he was Wally, he ruined the solemnity of the moment.

“For the record,” he said, “I hate future me.”

You blinked.

“He’s got this whole tragic cheekbone thing going on. Very annoying. Very effective. I feel manipulated by my own bone structure.”

You laughed before you could stop yourself.

Wally’s face changed at the sound. He looked hungry for it, then immediately guilty for wanting anything from you while the air still smelled like lightning.

You crossed your arms. “Are you actually jealous of yourself?”

“Yes,” he said at once. “Deeply. In a way I’m not proud of but am choosing to be honest about for personal growth reasons.”

“Wally.”

“He knows things,” Wally said, the humor thinning into something true. “He looks at you like he knows what it feels like when you let him stay.”

Your breath caught.

He noticed. Of course he noticed. The man could probably count your heartbeats. He looked away anyway, giving you the mercy of pretending he had not.

“Do I?” he asked.

Your voice came out softer than you intended. “Do you what?”

“Make you happy?”

The question hurt because he was trying to sound casual. He was very bad at it.

“Sometimes,” you said.

Wally nodded. He absorbed that like it was more precious than a yes.

Then he asked, “Do I hurt you?”

You did not answer quickly enough.

His face fell in careful increments, hope withdrawing before he could embarrass either of you with how much it mattered.

“That’s what I thought,” he said.

“Wally, I don’t know what happens.”

“Neither do I.” He looked at his hands. “But I know myself.”

The memory hit him twenty minutes after the other Wally vanished.

One second, Wally was standing in your kitchen with his hand wrapped in a towel because he had managed to cut himself cleaning up the mug he had broken. The next, his face went blank. Not empty. Elsewhere.

You watched his fingers loosen around the towel.

“Wally?”

He blinked once. Lightning crawled over his knuckles and died there, trapped under his skin.

“I remember this,” he said.

Your stomach tightened. “The mug?”

“No.” His eyes lifted to yours, and whatever he saw made him look away again too quickly. “You. Standing there. Asking me if I’m going to keep punishing myself for choices I haven’t made yet.”

“I haven’t said that.”

“I know.”

The silence after that felt worse than the words. You could see him trying to put the memory down carefully, like something sharp he had found in the dark. He did not tell you what came before it. He did not tell you what came after. He only pressed the towel harder against his palm and breathed through whatever future had just crossed his face.

You hated that he was trying to protect you from it.

You hated more that he was probably trying to protect himself.

The gala happened three days later.

You went because you were stubborn, because future-Wally had warned instead of trusted, and because you refused to let any version of the man you were falling for start making your choices for you.

Present-Wally went with you because he was stubborn too, and because he had taken to hovering near your life with the restless restraint of someone trying very hard not to become a cage.

He wore a suit.

That felt important in a way you did not want to unpack. You had seen him in the Flash suit, in hoodies, in your apartment with blood on his skin and rain in his hair. You had never seen him like this, dressed in dark red with a gold tie and his hair combed back until it gave up halfway through the evening. 

He looked handsome enough to be irritating, which you told him as soon as he arrived.

His grin flashed. “I’ll take it.”

“You would take anything as a compliment.”

“From you? Mostly.”

His eyes dropped, not quickly enough to be subtle, taking in the deep burgundy dress you had chosen because it almost matched his suit, and the gold at your ears that echoed his tie. The grin softened into something less practiced. “You look beautiful.”

Your mouth forgot what it had been about to do.

Wally noticed. Of course he noticed. His smile tilted, gentler now, a little nervous around the edges. “Sorry. Was that too much?”

“No,” you said, and hated how honest it sounded.

His gaze flicked once more over the line of your dress, then came back to your face like he had made himself return there. “Good,” he said, smile going crooked. “Because I’ve been trying not to say it since you opened your door.”

You rolled your eyes and turned away before he could see too much.

The Central City Museum gala was exactly as unbearable as you expected. Donors smiled beside exhibits they did not understand. Champagne moved through the room on silver trays. Half the city’s wealthy philanthropists pretended not to stare at Wally, whose identity was public enough that people felt entitled to his attention and famous enough that they lowered their voices when he turned away.

For the first hour, nothing happened.

For the second, you almost relaxed.

That was when the ancient clock in the west gallery began ticking backward.

Wally heard it first.

You knew because his entire body changed before the room did — smile gone, shoulders tense, hand already finding your elbow. Then the lights flickered, and everyone else finally looked up.

“Stay behind me,” he said.

You gave him a look.

His mouth tightened. “Sorry. Stand wherever you want, preferably somewhere that puts my body between yours and the explosion.”

“Better.”

The glass cases rattled. Somewhere, someone screamed. Above the east hall, the clock began to chime and forgot when to stop.

Then every reflective surface in the gallery filled with lightning.

Wally pushed civilians toward the exits faster than human panic could understand. He was motion and command, red-gold arcs flickering under the cuffs of his suit because he had not changed, because there was no time, because there was never enough time with him.

You were halfway to the staff corridor when the rupture opened.

It did not look like the one from the museum basement. This one was narrower, almost beautiful, a vertical wound of white light splitting the air beside the ancient clock. You felt it pull at you. Not your body exactly. Something deeper. Memory, maybe. Possibility. The parts of you that had already touched Wally out of order.

You reached for the wall.

Wally shouted your name.

The world lurched.

A hand closed around yours.

For one dizzy second, you thought it was present-Wally. Then you looked up and saw the older eyes.

Future-Wally.

His grip was desperate. “I told you not to come.”

You should have been afraid.

Instead, anger hit first.

You slapped him.

The sound cracked through the gallery, sharp enough that even the rupture seemed to pause.

Future-Wally’s head turned with it. He froze, one hand still wrapped around yours, red blooming faintly on his cheek.

Across the room, present-Wally stared.

You pointed at the future version of him. “You do not get to appear in my kitchen, ask me to obey you without explanation, and then look betrayed when I don’t.”

Future-Wally’s jaw worked.

“You promised,” you said, and you did not know where the words came from until they were already out. “You promised you’d stop doing this.”

Both Wallys went still.

You felt the sentence settle into the wrong place in the timeline.

Future-Wally looked devastated.

Present-Wally looked like he had been shot.

The rupture screamed.

Future-Wally released your hand and shoved you toward his younger self. Present-Wally caught you immediately, one arm around your waist, his body braced between you and the white light.

“Get her out,” future-Wally said.

Present-Wally’s eyes burned. “What did you do?”

Future-Wally smiled without humor. “Loved her badly, apparently.”

Then the rupture swallowed him.

Heat Lightning

After the gala, Wally disappeared for four days.

Present-Wally. Your Wally, though you had not let yourself think of him that way until he was gone long enough for fear to make language honest.

You told yourself he was busy. Central City had disasters the way other cities had weather. You told yourself he was working with Barry, or the Titans, or the League, or whatever impossible network of people handled a Speed Force rupture when it started aiming itself at one woman’s life.

By the second day, you were angry.

By the third, you were scared.

By the fourth, you opened your apartment door and found him sitting in the hallway with his back against the opposite wall, knees drawn up, hair a mess, a paper bag from your favorite takeout place beside him.

He looked up at you.

“I didn’t want to knock if you were sleeping,” he said.

Your heart hurt so violently you almost closed the door in his face.

Instead, you stepped into the hallway. “You have superspeed.”

“Yeah.”

“You could have checked.”

“That felt creepy.”

“You have come through my window bleeding.”

“That was emergency creepy. Different category.”

You stared at him until his attempt at a smile collapsed.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“For which part?”

“All the parts currently available to me.”

That was such a Wally answer that it made you furious all over again.

You crossed your arms. “You disappeared.”

“I know.”

“You don’t get to do that because a future version of you scared you.”

“I know.”

“You don’t get to decide I’m safer if you’re gone.”

His eyes lifted to yours. “I know.”

The hallway went quiet. Somewhere behind a neighboring door, a television laugh track rose and faded. Wally looked tired in a way that had nothing to do with sleep. He looked young, too, painfully young compared to the version of him who had stood in the gala rupture and taken your slap like he believed he deserved it.

You hated that you understood him.

You hated more that understanding did not make the hurt vanish.

“I needed to know,” he said. “If staying away fixed anything.”

Your throat tightened. “Did it?”

“No.” He huffed a laugh and rubbed both hands over his face. “It made me useless and annoying. Barry threatened to sedate me with a sandwich.”

“That doesn’t make sense.”

“It was a big sandwich.”

You did not want to smile. Your mouth did it anyway, traitorous and small.

Wally saw. The relief on his face was immediate and too much.

You opened the door wider. “Come in before my neighbors start enjoying this.”

He stood, grabbed the bag, and followed you inside.

For a while, you ate dinner on the floor because your coffee table was covered in museum paperwork and Wally seemed more comfortable there anyway. He finally told you what he knew. The rupture had attached itself to both of you during the basement incident from your past and his future. Or maybe his past and your past. The language kept failing. 

The important part was that the Speed Force was folding moments around an emotional anchor.

You looked at him over your noodles. “An emotional anchor.”

Wally winced. “That’s the term Barry used.”

“That sounds fake.”

“Most of my life sounds fake.”

“And I’m the anchor?”

“Maybe.” He looked down at his food. “Maybe we both are.”

You absorbed that slowly.

The apartment felt warm around you. Rain tapped softly against the windows, less violent than before. Wally sat across from you in sweatpants and an old Keystone City hoodie, socked feet stretched under your table, chopsticks held too carefully in hands that could break the sound barrier.

He was trying so hard to be still.

The realization moved through you like heat.

You set your food aside. “Do you remember things?”

He froze. “What?”

“From later.”

He did not answer immediately. You watched the rule pass behind his eyes, followed by something worse than guilt. 

Recognition.

That was answer enough.

You looked down at his hands, curled carefully against his own knees like he did not trust them to reach for you. “Is that what you’re doing?”

His voice came out quieter. “Doing what?”

“Waiting for me to become someone you have memories of.”

Wally looked away.

“I don’t mean to.”

“I know.”

“I’m trying to keep it clean.”

“It isn’t clean, Wally.”

His laugh came out rough. “Yeah, I’m getting that.”

The silence between you stretched thin. 

“Some,” he said at last.

You looked back at him.

“I remember some things,” Wally said. “Not all the time. It’s not like watching a movie. It’s worse than that. It’s little things. I’ll know where you keep the spare blanket before I’ve ever seen you take it out. I’ll reach for a mug you haven’t bought yet. Sometimes you’ll say something, and I’ll remember missing it before you finish the sentence.”

Your throat tightened.

He laughed once, without humor. “There are jokes I know I’ve heard from you, but I don’t know when you tell them. There are arguments where I only remember my own side, which is probably exactly as useless as it sounds.”

His fingers flexed against his knees.

“Sometimes I remember your hand in mine,” he said. “Sometimes I remember letting go.”

“Wally.”

“I know.” He closed his eyes. “That’s the problem. I know too much and not enough, and none of it belongs to me yet.”

The last word did something awful to you.

Yet.

He opened his eyes again, and the restraint in them looked almost painful. “That’s why I can’t answer you the way part of me wants to. Because I remember wanting you before I earned it.”

Wally looked at you then. Really looked. The air between you tightened, not with lightning this time, but with all the ordinary danger of wanting someone who was trying to be good.

“You can ask me to leave,” he said.

“I know.”

“I probably should.”

“Probably.”

He swallowed. “I don’t want to kiss you because future me already got to.”

Despite yourself, your mouth twitched. “Got to?”

“Bad phrasing,” he said immediately. “Terrible phrasing. I mean—” He exhaled, the joke falling away. “I want to kiss you because I want to. Right now. And because you want me to. Not because time already filled in the blank.”

You moved closer before fear could talk you out of it. Wally went very still.

“I’m not kissing you because someday I might love you,” you said.

Something flickered across his face, too quick to name and too honest to miss.

“Okay,” he said.

“I’m not asking you to know the ending,” you said. “I’m asking you to stay in this part with me.”

For once, Wally West did not have a quip ready in a heartbeat.

You leaned in slowly enough that he could move away. He did not. He watched you like every inch was a choice he refused to steal. When your mouth touched his, he exhaled so softly it almost sounded like pain.

Wally kissed you and, for once, did not try to beat the moment to the finish line.

It was almost funny, how careful he was. Wally West, who could outrun time, holding himself still with one hand braced beside your head and the other curled loosely at your waist, as if touching you too quickly might send both of you into another century.

When he pulled back, his smile was crooked and ruined around the edges.

His hands did not tighten. That somehow made it worse. They hovered near your waist, fingers flexing with all the things he was not letting himself take, restraint trembling through him while his eyes dropped to your mouth.

You closed the distance this time.

He let you.

You tasted takeout sauce and mint and the faint electric edge that always seemed to cling to his skin. You kissed him harder, and Wally made himself stay with you second by second, letting you set the pace until your hand slid into his hair and pulled.

He groaned.

The sound went straight through you.

His hands found your waist then, careful even with the urgency in them.

“Tell me if I’m moving too fast,” he said.

You laughed breathlessly against his mouth. “That is a terrible thing for you to say.”

“I know.” His forehead tipped against yours, smile flickering helplessly back to life. “I realized it after I said it.”

You kissed him again because he was ridiculous and because you wanted him so badly your body felt bright with it. Wally’s hands tightened. In the next second, he lifted you into his lap like it cost him nothing. Then he froze beneath you, eyes wide, like he had surprised himself more than you.

“Was that okay?”

You looked down at him, at the flush high on his cheeks, at the effort written into every line of his body.

“Yes,” you said. “That was okay.”

Relief flickered across his face. Then you rolled your hips once, and relief became something much less composed.

“Jesus,” he breathed.

You smiled despite yourself. “Still jealous of future you?”

“Currently trying very hard not to think about that guy.”

“Good.”

You kissed him again, deeper this time, and felt him give under you in increments. The fastest man alive, and he let you slow him down with your hands in his hair and your body settling warm over his. His fingers slipped beneath the hem of your shirt, then stopped against your skin.

You pulled back. “Wally.”

His eyes lifted to yours.

“You can touch me.”

The words hit him hard. You saw it in his face, in the way desire moved through him and dragged reverence with it. His hands spread against your waist, warm and broad, thumbs stroking once over your skin like he was learning you for the first time because he was.

He did not say, I know.

He did not say, I remember.

He said, “Like this?”

Your chest tightened.

“Yes.”

His hands moved with aching care, up your sides, over your ribs, pausing when your breath caught. He watched your face for every answer you gave him, the spoken ones and the ones your body offered before language. When he drew your shirt up, he waited until you lifted your arms. When his mouth found your throat, he went slow enough that the scrape of his teeth made your thighs tighten around him.

“Wally,” you whispered.

His breath shuddered against your skin. “Yeah?”

“Bedroom.”

For half a second, you thought he might short-circuit.

Then he stood with you in his arms.

The world blurred.

Your back hit the mattress before you finished gasping. Wally was over you, one hand braced beside your head, already apologizing.

“Sorry. Sorry, that was—”

You caught his face and kissed him quiet.

He melted.

There was no other word for it. Wally West, all lightning and restless motion, softened over you when you kissed him like you wanted him there. His weight settled carefully between your thighs, and the hard line of him pressed against you through layers of clothing. Your body answered before you could think, hips lifting, friction dragging a gasp out of both of you.

Wally dropped his forehead to your shoulder. “I’m trying to be respectful.”

“You are.”

“I am also having several disrespectful thoughts.”

You laughed, breathless and wanting. “Good.”

His mouth found yours again, and after that, the room became touch.

He undressed you slowly because you asked him to. He kissed each inch of skin as it appeared, not with polished confidence, but with attention that made your hands shake. His mouth moved over your collarbone, the swell of your breast, the soft skin beneath. When he took your nipple into his mouth, your back arched, and his hand flattened against your spine to hold you without trapping you.

“Tell me,” he murmured against your skin.

You tangled your fingers in his hair. “Don’t stop.”

He obeyed like the words mattered.

By the time his hand slid between your thighs, you were slick and aching, your breath uneven in the quiet room. Wally looked up at you from where he had kissed a path down your stomach, hair mussed, eyes dark, mouth swollen from yours.

“I want to taste you,” he said.

Heat rushed through you.

He pressed a kiss to the inside of your thigh. “Present tense. Right now. Because I want to. Because you want me to, if you do.”

Your heart twisted so hard it almost hurt.

“Yes,” you said. “I want you to.”

Wally’s eyes closed for a moment, like he needed the words to settle.

Then he lowered his mouth to you.

The first slow drag of his tongue made you gasp. 

He paused immediately, arms looped beneath your thighs and palms spread over your hips, holding you open against his broad shoulders while his eyes flicked up to check your face. 

You nodded, and he did it again, slower this time, learning your pleasure with a focus that made your entire body burn. 

He was good. Of course he was good; he was responsive and eager and almost unbearably patient once he understood that patience made you shake.

Your thighs tightened around his shoulders. Wally groaned against you, the vibration dragging a broken sound from your throat.

“Please,” you managed.

He did it again.

The pleasure built with devastating precision, not rushed, not taken from memory, each stroke chosen because of the way you reacted beneath him. When he slid one finger inside you, he watched your face. When he added another, he waited for the soft yes you gave him before curling them just right.

Your orgasm hit slowly and then all at once, a wave of heat and release that made your hands clutch at his hair. Wally held you through it, mouth gentle as you came down, his hand easing away only when your body stopped trembling.

He kissed the inside of your thigh.

Then your hip.

Then your stomach.

When he climbed back up to you, his mouth was wet, his eyes bright, and something in his expression looked dangerously close to awe.

You pulled him down and kissed him.

He made a sound into your mouth that told you exactly how close he was to losing the last of his restraint.

“Condom?” you asked.

Wally nodded too quickly. “Wallet.”

“Your wallet is in the living room.”

He vanished.

A gust of air hit your bare skin.

He reappeared beside the bed with his wallet in hand and his hair even worse than before. “Sorry. Practical use of powers. Very sexy. Extremely romantic.”

You laughed so hard you covered your face.

Wally’s smile broke open, helpless and bright, and for one second, there he was. Your Wally. Young and nervous and trying, not future grief, not Speed Force omen, not a superhero, just a man standing half-undressed beside your bed with a condom wrapper in his hand and hope all over his face.

“Come here,” you said.

He did.

You pushed his hoodie up, and he let you pull it over his head. His body was lean and warm under your hands, muscle shifting beneath freckled skin, old scars silvering faintly across his chest and ribs. Your fingers drifted over his side, casual and curious.

Wally went still.

Not tense. Not exactly. More like something in him had skipped ahead without the rest of him.

You drew your hand back. “Did I hurt you?”

“No,” he said too quickly, then softer, “No. You didn’t.”

But his eyes had gone distant, fixed on some point over your shoulder, as if he were listening to an echo you couldn’t hear.

You covered your hand with his.

“Stay here,” you whispered.

His gaze lifted.

“With me,” you said.

His throat moved. “I’m here.”

When he pushed into you, he did it slowly, jaw clenched with the effort of restraint. You felt every inch, the stretch, the heat, the way his breath broke when your body took him. He stopped once he was fully inside, trembling above you.

“Okay?” he asked.

You wrapped your legs around his waist. “Okay.”

He kissed you before he moved.

Maybe that was what undid you most. Not the speed. Not the strength. The kiss. The fact that he stayed close, forehead brushing yours, mouth finding yours again and again as his hips began to move. He built the rhythm carefully, letting you pull him deeper, letting your hands guide him, letting the present teach him what the future had no right to give.

The bed creaked softly beneath you. Rain whispered against the windows. Wally’s breathing roughened as he drove into you, still controlled, still careful, but losing the battle by degrees.

You wanted him to lose it a little. You wanted to see what wanting looked like when he stopped being afraid of arriving too soon.

“Wally,” you gasped. “Harder.”

His eyes searched yours. Whatever he saw there broke something open.

He gave you harder.

The shift stole the breath from your lungs. His hips snapped into yours with more force, one hand locked around your thigh, holding you open for him while the other braced beside your head. Pleasure sparked hot and bright through your body. You clung to him, nails dragging down his back, and he groaned your name like it belonged to him only because you had handed it over.

Your second orgasm rose faster, pulled tight by the angle of his hips and the desperate sound of his voice against your throat.

“That’s it,” he whispered. “I’ve got you. I’m here. I’m right here.”

You came with his name in your mouth.

Wally followed seconds later, shuddering hard above you, his face buried in your neck as he held himself still and let the pleasure take him.

You felt the last, helpless rhythm of him, the way his body went taut and then loose, the way his breath broke warm against your skin. His hand found yours beside your head and held on like he needed the anchor.

For a long moment, neither of you moved. His heartbeat hammered against yours. His skin was damp and hot. The room smelled like rain and sex and lightning.

Then Wally lifted his head, eyes hazy and dark, his mouth soft from yours. “Don’t move,” he murmured, then immediately winced. “Not in a weird way. In a responsible-condom-disposal way.”

A laugh slipped out of you, breathless and wrecked. “You are unbelievable.”

“I know. I’m devastatingly practical.”

He pulled away carefully, jaw tightening like even that was too much sensation, and tied off the condom before dropping it into the trash by your bed. When he came back, he did not rush. He stretched out beside you slowly, one hand finding your waist like he was asking permission to return.

You answered by turning into him.

Wally softened all at once, a quiet exhale leaving him as he gathered you closer with a care that made your chest ache, as if the shape of you against him were something he wanted to learn in the right order. His arm settled around your back, his palm warm between your shoulder blades, and your cheek found the damp curve of his chest.

For a while, there was only the rain against the window and the uneven slowing of his breath. His fingers moved absently over your spine, tracing nothing you could name. You felt his mouth press once to your hairline, then linger there.

Eventually, he lifted his head.

His expression was open in a way that scared you more than any rupture ever could.

“Don’t look at me like that,” you whispered.

His thumb brushed your cheek. “Like what?”

“Like losing me already happened.”

Pain flickered through his eyes.

Then he kissed you, soft and present.

“Okay,” he said. “Then I’ll look at you like you’re here.”

Static

You woke to the smell of lightning.

For one soft, disoriented moment, you thought it came from the Wally beside you. Present-Wally. Your Wally. His arm was still heavy across your waist, his chest warm against your back, his breathing slow and even in a way you had not known he was capable of. Morning light filtered through the curtains in pale strips, touching the rumpled sheets, the clothes abandoned near the foot of the bed, the faint red marks his mouth had left at your shoulder, and the scratches you left along his back.

Then the air snapped.

Wally woke instantly.

His body went from sleep-warm to alert in less than a second, arm tightening around you before he seemed to remember himself. He loosened his grip, but he did not move away.

You knew before he said anything.

“It’s him?” you asked.

Wally’s jaw brushed your shoulder when he nodded.

Lightning flickered again, not in the bedroom, but somewhere beyond it. The hallway. Close enough to hear. Far enough that the other Wally had chosen not to come in.

That choice made the room feel colder.

Present-Wally sat up slowly. The sheet slipped to his waist, and for one painful second, he looked exactly like what he was: young, half-dressed, frightened, and still trying not to let fear tell him what to do. He reached for his clothes.

“You don’t have to go out there,” you said.

His mouth curved without humor. “Yeah, I do.”

You caught his wrist before he could stand.

He looked down at your hand, then back at you.

“Don’t let him make you hate yourself,” you said.

Wally’s face softened.

“I’ll try.”

You almost told him that trying had not saved the future version from anything. Instead, you let him go.

He pulled on his sweatpants and left the bedroom without turning on the light. You sat up, sheet held against your chest, and listened through the half-open door.

The hallway outside your bedroom was quiet for a moment.

Then, present-Wally said, “You’re getting worse.”

Future-Wally laughed softly.

It was a terrible sound.

“Good morning to you too.”

“You can’t keep doing this.”

“I know.”

“You keep saying that.”

“I know that too.”

You slipped out of bed and found Wally’s discarded hoodie tangled near the foot of the mattress. It was soft, warm from being trapped beneath the blanket, and it smelled like him. You pulled it on before stepping carefully toward the doorway.

From the shadows at the end of the hall, you could see them.

Present-Wally stood near the living room, barefoot and tense, shoulders squared like he could physically block the rest of the apartment from himself. Future-Wally stood by the front door. He had not crossed into the hall. His suit was torn worse than before, the red darkened in places you did not want to identify. There was a bruise along his jaw and blood at his hairline, but it was his expression that made your stomach twist.

He looked at the bedroom door as if it were both a holy ground and a crime scene.

Then his eyes found you.

The future version of Wally West went very still.

You suddenly felt aware of everything: the hoodie hanging loose around your thighs, your bare legs, your sleep-warmed skin, the tender aches in your body from the night before. Nothing about you was indecent, not really, but the intimacy of being seen like this by a version of him who looked as if he had already lost you made your throat tighten.

Future-Wally looked away first.

“Sorry,” he said.

Present-Wally’s hands curled into fists. “Don’t.”

“I said sorry.”

“No, you said it like you were apologizing for remembering.”

Future-Wally’s mouth tightened.

The room held its breath around them.

“You shouldn’t be here,” present-Wally said.

“I know.”

“Then why are you?”

Future-Wally’s gaze dragged back to him. “Because this is where I always lose.”

The words moved through the apartment like a draft.

Present-Wally stared at him. “What does that mean?”

Future-Wally looked past him, not at your body this time, but at your face. His expression changed again, and you hated how much of it you were beginning to understand. The hunger to reach for you. The fear of what reaching had done. The grief of standing outside a room where he had once been happy and knowing happiness had become part of the evidence.

“It means this is the part I keep trying to save,” he said.

Present-Wally’s voice dropped. “Or the part you keep trying to erase.”

Future-Wally flinched as if he had been struck.

You stepped fully into the hall.

Both of them looked at you.

You kept one hand curled in the hem of the hoodie because you needed something to hold on to. “Tell us what happens.”

Future-Wally’s face shut down.

“No.”

“Wally.”

“No.” His voice cracked on it, then steadied badly. “I tell you, and it changes how you walk into a room. It changes how he looks at every door. It changes the choice before you even get to make it.”

Present-Wally moved closer. “You don’t get to decide that.”

Future-Wally laughed once, sharp and broken. “I am the only one here who knows what happens when I don’t.”

“Then say it.”

The older Wally’s eyes went bright.

For a second, you thought he might.

Instead, he looked at present-Wally with something close to pity.

“You think restraint makes you different from me,” he said. “You think because you asked, because you waited, because you let her choose, you can’t still be the reason she ends up in that basement.”

Present-Wally went pale.

“That’s enough,” you said.

Future-Wally closed his eyes at the sound of your voice.

“I know,” he whispered.

“No, I don’t think you do.” You stepped closer despite the way present-Wally shifted, as if every instinct in his body wanted to stop you. “You keep coming here to warn us, but all you’re doing is turning yourself into proof that everything goes wrong.”

Future-Wally opened his eyes.

There was so much pain in them that your anger almost failed you.

Almost.

“You told me not to let you run from me,” you said. “This is you running, Wally. You’re just doing it in circles.”

His mouth parted.

Lightning sparked beneath his skin, wild and unstable.

Present-Wally glanced at it. “You need to leave before the rupture pulls you again.”

Future-Wally did not seem to hear him. He was still looking at you.

“You said that to me before,” he murmured.

“When?”

His smile broke. “After.”

The word hit the hallway strangely.

After what?

You knew he would not answer.

He stepped back toward the door, body already starting to blur at the edges. Present-Wally reached for him, but future-Wally shook his head.

“Don’t come after me.”

“You know I will,” present-Wally said.

“Yeah.” Future-Wally looked at him then, and for the first time, you saw the resemblance clearly. Not the face. The fear. “That’s the problem.”

Lightning gathered around him.

You moved before you thought better of it.

“Wally.”

He looked at you one last time.

You wanted to ask if he had loved you. You wanted to ask if you had loved him. You wanted to ask what kind of future could turn the man from your bed into the ghost at your door.

Instead, you said, “I’m still here.”

Future-Wally’s expression crumpled.

“I know,” he said.

Then he vanished.

The silence after him was worse than the lightning.

Present-Wally stood in the middle of your living room with his back to you, head bowed, shoulders shaking once with a breath he could not quite control. You crossed the space slowly and touched his arm.

He turned into you immediately.

For a while, neither of you spoke. He held you carefully, almost too carefully, his face buried against your hair. You felt his heartbeat racing against yours, too fast to be normal, too human to be frightening.

“I’m scared,” he said.

You closed your eyes.

“I know.”

His arms tightened. “I don’t want to become him.”

You thought of future-Wally’s face when he looked at your bedroom door. You thought of promises made later and broken earlier. You thought of the way every version of him kept trying to save you by taking choices out of your hands.

“Then don’t,” you said.

Wally laughed once, soft and miserable. “Just like that?”

“No.” You pulled back enough to look at him. “But start there.”

His eyes searched yours.

You touched his cheek. “Start by staying.”

So he did.

Threshold

The rupture peaked under the museum two days later.

Some part of you had known it would end where it began, beneath the storage wing where the air still smelled faintly of smoke and ozone no matter how many cleaning companies the museum hired. The basement had been closed for repairs since the incident six months ago. That was the official version, anyway. Time had made the truth harder to file.

You stopped trying to conjugate it.

By then, neither of you was pretending the future could be avoided by looking away from it. Wally had spent the last forty-eight hours with Barry, with sensors, with maps of temporal fractures spread across your kitchen table, with three empty pizza boxes stacked beside a notebook full of equations you could not read. He had slept for ninety minutes on your couch and woken with lightning under his skin, one hand reaching for you before his eyes opened.

He did not apologize for it.

You did not ask him to.

Wally’s Titan comm lit up on your kitchen table, a temporal-fracture warning flashing across the screen. He was on his feet before the first pulse finished. 

“Museum,” he said.

You were already standing by the door.

“You don’t have to come,” he said.

“Yes, I do.”

He looked like he wanted to argue.

He didn’t.

That told you how bad it was.

He got you there fast enough that the city smeared into light and sirens. By the time your feet touched pavement again, police had already blocked off the street outside the museum. Wally did not slow until he had carried you past the barricade and through the broken service entrance, stopping only when the stairwell down to the archive cracked open ahead of you. 

Faint gold light pulsed below the floor like a heartbeat. The lower archive was almost unrecognizable. Shelving units had twisted into impossible shapes. Artifacts flickered through different states of decay, bronze shining new and then ancient, paper turning to dust and back again. In the center of the room, the rupture spun open, white-gold and hungry.

Future-Wally stood in front of it.

He looked worse than the last time you had seen him.

The blood and bruising were almost familiar by now. It was the rest of him that made your stomach drop: the scorched tear in his suit, the broken arcs of lightning crawling over his skin, the way his edges blurred every few seconds, as if the room were struggling to hold him in place.

He turned when present-Wally entered, and relief crossed his face before he saw you beside him.

Then the relief curdled.

“You brought her,” he said.

“She insisted,” present-Wally answered.

Future-Wally laughed, bitter and exhausted. “Yeah. She does that.”

You stepped forward. “Tell us how to close it.”

Future-Wally looked at you for a long moment.

Then he said, “I can reset it.”

Present-Wally went still beside you.

“What does that mean?” you asked.

Future-Wally’s mouth tightened. “I can go back to the first rupture and stop the tether from forming. You never get pulled in. The timeline stabilizes. You won’t remember any of this.”

The room seemed to tilt.

Present-Wally said, “And neither will I.”

Future-Wally did not answer.

That was answer enough.

Lightning cracked overhead. You felt Wally’s hand brush yours, then stop, waiting for permission even now. You took his hand and held it in yours.

Future-Wally watched the movement like it hurt him.

“You don’t know what happens if we don’t,” he said.

“You keep saying that,” you replied. “You keep warning me about pain like I haven’t already chosen any of this.”

His face twisted. “I watched you die.”

The words slammed into the room.

Present-Wally’s grip tightened around your hand.

Future-Wally looked at him. “That’s the part you don’t remember yet. That’s the part I’ve been trying to outrun. The rupture takes her because it’s attached to us. At least, that’s what I thought. Every time we chose each other, it got stronger, and I thought if I could make her hate me early enough, maybe it would let go.”

Your chest ached.

“You idiot,” you whispered.

He flinched.

“You absolute fucking idiot.”

Present-Wally let out a strangled laugh that had no humor in it. “Yeah. That tracks.”

Future-Wally looked between you both, frantic now. “You think this is romantic because you don’t remember holding her body.”

“No,” present-Wally said, voice shaking. “I think it’s wrong because you do.”

The rupture screamed louder. Wind tore through the archive. Papers flew around you in a cyclone of half-burned records and impossible dates. Future-Wally staggered toward the light.

“I can fix it,” he said.

Present-Wally moved.

For a second, the room filled with nothing but speed. Red and gold crashed against white. The two versions of him blurred together, then apart, lightning striking lightning. You shielded your face as they fought, not with hatred, but with the horror of two griefs trying to occupy the same body.

Then present-Wally broke through.

He grabbed future-Wally by the front of his torn suit and slammed him back against a warped shelving unit.

“You don’t get to call erasing her a rescue,” he said.

Future-Wally’s face crumpled.

“I can’t lose her,” he whispered.

Present-Wally’s voice broke. “Then stop making the choice for her.”

The rupture pulsed.

You felt it then. Not as science. Not as something Barry could name on a whiteboard or Wally could outrun if he found the right angle. You felt it in the pull beneath your ribs, in the way every impossible thread in the room stretched toward the same terrified center.

Wally.

Not just the one holding your hand. All of him. Every version that had reached backward. Every version that had tried to turn grief into strategy. Every version that had seen the ending and decided the only way to love you was to get there first and tear it apart before you could choose him.

The rupture was not feeding on the two of you loving each other.

It was feeding on him trying to undo it.

The light split open.

Possibility poured through in pieces: the loop, the museum basement, Wally’s hand on your wrist, his mouth on your knuckles, coffee on your shoes, blood on your bedroom floor, his mouth between your thighs, his voice saying he was here. Future-Wally crying over a version of you who had died because he tried to hold the timeline together with his bare hands.

And under it, through it, around it, an opening in the lightning.

Not a reset.

A release.

“Wally,” you said.

Both of them looked at you.

You held out your hand to the younger one.

Present-Wally came to you instantly, but not too fast. Even then, he remembered. Even with the world ending, he let you see him choose to cross the distance.

“The tether is not the problem,” you said.

Future-Wally stared. “What?”

“You’re pulling it tight.” You looked at the rupture, at the light bending toward every version of him that had tried to outrun grief. “You keep trying to control where it ends.”

Present-Wally’s hand slid into yours.

You squeezed once. “Let the moment finish.”

Present-Wally’s eyes met yours.

For one breath, the world narrowed to the warmth of his hand and the terror in his face. He did not understand all of it yet. Maybe neither of you did. But he trusted you anyway.

Across the rupture, Future-Wally went very still. Understanding, slowly and terribly, spread across his face, as if he had finally heard the thing he had been running from. 

“You want me to let go,” he said.

You shook your head. “I want you to stop holding on so hard that it breaks.” 

His mouth trembled around something too damaged to be a laugh. “If you’re wrong—”

“She might be,” present-Wally said.

The answer stunned him into silence.

Present-Wally looked at you. His face was pale. Afraid. Honest.

“We might be wrong,” he said. “But I’m not erasing you to make myself feel brave.”

The rupture opened wider.

For a terrible second, you thought that meant failure.

Then Future-Wally lowered his hand.

The lightning around him faltered.

All at once, you understood: the rupture had never been a wound trying to swallow you. It had never been trying to pull him apart. He had been holding it open, a fist clenched around the timeline, refusing to let the moment finish.

Future-Wally looked at you one last time, grief-stricken and impossibly young beneath all that ruin.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

Then he stepped into the light.

For one second, everything happened.

You saw him as the light took him: Wally laughing too loudly with coffee splashed over his hand; Wally bleeding on your bedroom floor; Wally standing in your kitchen like he already knew where every mug belonged; Wally kissing you with rain still damp in his hair; Wally watching you sleep like the sight of you breathing was something he did not trust to last.

Then, the memories broke darker.

Wally running through lightning with your name caught in his throat. Wally reaching the museum too late. Wally holding a version of you who did not move. Wally tearing the timeline open with his bare hands because grief had convinced him that love was something he could fix if he only ran fast enough.

At the center of it all, Future-Wally stopped running.

The light collapsed.

Still

One week later, Wally West knocked on your door.

You knew it was your Wally before you opened it. You did not know how. Maybe you had learned the shape of his presence without lightning around it. Maybe you had learned the difference between a haunting and a homecoming. Maybe you had spent a week listening for footsteps that never came, and hope had finally learned his rhythm.

When you opened the door, he was standing in the hallway with flowers in one hand and a paper bag in the other.

His hair was a mess. His jacket was half-zipped. There was a faint bruise on his jaw, already yellowing at the edges. He looked nervous enough to run and stubborn enough to stay.

No lightning.

No future grief.

No borrowed intimacy.

Just Wally.

“Hi,” he said.

You looked at him for a long moment. “Hi, Wally.”

His shoulders dropped like your voice had unmade the end of the world.

“I brought replacement coffee,” he said, lifting the bag slightly. “And flowers, because apparently when you want to ask someone if you can start over, those are recommended. These are not apology flowers, though. Or they are. Actually, they might be. I panicked at the florist.”

You leaned against the doorframe. “You panicked?”

“The florist was very intense. She asked what message I wanted to send, and I said, ‘Sorry about the time shenanigans. And about my alternate self,’ which, in hindsight, was not helpful.”

You laughed.

Wally’s mouth softened.

For once, he did not rush to fill the silence after. He stood there and let the sound settle between you.

“Do you still remember too much?” you asked.

His fingers tightened around the flowers.

“Some,” he said. “Less every day. Barry says that’s probably good. The timeline is correcting around him letting go, apparently, which is a very Barry way to say my future-self finally stopped making everything worse.”

“And what do you say?”

Wally looked at you, open and scared and so careful it made your chest ache.

“I say I remember enough to know I don’t want to use any of it to skip ahead.”

Your throat tightened.

He held your gaze. “I’d like to know you in order, if you’ll let me.”

Outside, somewhere far off, thunder rolled over Central City. For once, it sounded only like weather.

You stepped aside.

“Yes,” you said.

Wally exhaled shakily.

“Yeah?”

“Yes, Wally.”

He smiled then, slow and bright and disbelieving, as if every version of him had been waiting at the edge of this moment and only this one had been allowed to enter it.

“You can come in,” you said, and this time there was no future hidden inside the invitation.

He crossed the threshold like he had all the time in the world.

The first day you thought he was just napping. 

By day three, you stop checking the window every time headlights pass your apartment building.

By day five, you start doing it again.

Jason should have been back by now.

Because logically, Jason being gone longer than expected is not unusual. Vigilante adjacent mercenary work probably does not operate on clean scheduling. There are explosions involved. International airspace violations. 

Still.

A week feels strange.

The apartment feels wrong too.

His stupid boots are not by the door. His jacket is not slung over the couch. Nobody is stealing bites of cookie dough directly from the mixing bowl while claiming it’s “quality control.”

The reading nook sits empty. Fatson Todd has somehow migrated into Jason’s usual corner like he’s inheriting territory.

You stare at him suspiciously while curled beneath a blanket.

“This is bad, right?” you ask the plushie.

Fatson Todd offers no useful insights.

Which had not actually answered anything.

Next, you texted his family. Unfortunately, all they had to say is that Jason is fine. Dumb, but fine. Apparently he threatened them with bodily harm if they gave you any details. 

After that, you waited. Because Jason had a key.

And the thing about Jason was that he appeared in places unexpectedly all the time now. Fire escapes. Balconies. Your couch at two in the morning claiming he “was in the area.”

So naturally, you kept expecting to hear the lock click.

You figured eventually he’d appear in your apartment like nothing is wrong. You even rehearsed your response. Or variations of responses depending on how mad you want to act. 

Cool and casual: oh wow look who remembered i exist

Maybe slightly emotional: i was worried, idiot

Possibly dramatic: i almost filed a missing persons report with batman

But the lock stayed still. The apartment stayed quiet.

By day six, desperation won and you decided to try the old faithful. You dragged your cooler down to Crime Alley with enough cookies to feed a small militia and left a note tucked beneath the lid.

for jason <3 pls stop acting mysterious and text me back

It had felt solid at the time.

Romantic, even.

Unfortunately, when you returned the next morning, five homeless men had somehow picked the cooler lock and were happily eating chocolate chunk on the curb.

One of them waved. “Those peanut-free?”

You blinked.

“…yes?”

“Oh good,” another said around a mouthful of cookie. “Frank’s allergic.”

So now this was your life. You got bullied by five homeless men and volunteered to bake them cookies weekly. You stared darkly at the tray of fresh snickerdoodles sliding into the oven.

That is when an idea struck you. If being nice and baking cookies doesn't wrok… you will have to get Jason’s attention some other way. 

You have to become a criminal. 

—

Post your latest cookie drop off (Anthony loved the snickerdoodle but asked if you can add caramel next time), you are contemplating your life of crime as you walk home. 

You needed to do something dramatic enough to get the Red Hood’s attention. Preferably not dangerous-dangerous. Just a little concerning.

A little criminal.

You chew on your lip thoughtfully while waiting at a crosswalk.

What crimes even existed?

Grand larceny?

Absolutely not. You did not have the upper body strength for grand anything.

Auto theft?

You pause.

“…I don’t even have my full license yet,” you mutter to yourself.

Also Gotham cars probably exploded when hotwired wrong. That felt like important information.

Arson was obviously out.

Tax fraud sounded boring.

Blackmail required confidence.

You pass a tagged wall.

Graffiti, though…

Now there was something with flair.

Low stakes. Artistic. Very Gotham.

Batman probably saw graffiti constantly.

The Red Hood definitely did. And it is enough a crime where people intervene but criminals don't get arrested. 

A tiny spark of determination settles in your chest.

Yes, this could work. You nod to yourself decisively and step off the curb—

A horn blares beside you.

You freeze mid-step.

The walk signal is still red.

Oh my god.

Oh my god.

You just jaywalked.

Your heart launches directly into your throat while a taxi speeds past, the driver glaring at you through the windshield.

For one horrifying second, genuine panic grips you.

This was it.

Your descent into criminality.

First jaywalking. Then graffiti. Then somehow you’d end up with a rogues gallery nickname like the baker or something and several unresolved issues with Batman.

You stand there for a moment, breathing hard.

Then slowly you push the panic down. 

You needed to get used to this feeling now.

The adrenaline. The danger. The lawlessness.

This was your life now.

You were living a life of crime.

Baby steps. —

CRIME ATTEMPT #1 — The spray paint situation is your first obstacle.

“This is criminal discrimination,” you mutter under your breath while standing in the Michael’s craft aisle at eight thirty at night.

The shelf stares back at you mockingly.

Neon pink. Pastel blue. Matte sage. Glitter silver. Glitter gold.

No black.

No red.

Nothing remotely intimidating.

Apparently Michael’s Arts & Crafts did not cater to aspiring vigilante bait.

You pick up the glitter silver can with deep resentment.

“…Fine,” you whisper. “We adapt.”

Ten minutes later, you are speed-walking through Gotham with a tote bag full of craft-store spray paint feeling profoundly unqualified for organized crime.

The December cold bites instantly through your coat. Wind whips down the alleyways hard enough to sting your eyes, but you keep going, scarf pulled high over the lower half of your face like the world’s least threatening supervillain.

Honestly, you look less like a criminal and more like someone about to lose a fight with seasonal allergies.

Still.

Commitment mattered.

You finally find the wall near Crime Alley by complete accident.

Tall brick. Mostly empty. A battered NO TRESPASSING sign hanging crooked nearby.

Your pulse spikes immediately.

Perfect.

This was exactly the kind of place vigilantes probably monitored.

The Red Hood would absolutely investigate suspicious graffiti activity here.

You glance around nervously before ducking into the alley, boots crunching against thin patches of snow.

Time to become mysterious.

You pull the silver spray can from your tote bag with trembling fingers. The little metal ball inside rattles ominously. Your breath fogs through the scarf while you stare at the blank brick wall.

Then you realize something horrifying.

You never actually planned what to paint.

“Oh no,” you whisper.

Your brain immediately empties itself.

What did criminals even paint?

Threats? Symbols? Cryptic warnings?

You panic instantly.

The spray can hisses accidentally when your finger jerks.

Think.

What would get Jason’s attention?

Something dramatic. Something meaningful. Something—

A snowflake drifts past your face.

You stare at it.

Then slowly look back at the wall.

Twenty minutes later, the alley is covered in glittering silver and blue snowflakes.

The glitter paint catches the alley light beautifully, sparkling softly against the dark brick while snow falls around you in lazy white drifts.

You step back slowly, breathing hard through the scarf.

“…Wait.”

It’s actually kind of cute.

Not intimidating.

Not remotely criminal.

But cute.

The problem is that now you’ve committed to the bit.

So you shove your hands into your coat pockets and linger awkwardly near the alley entrance waiting to be arrested.

Or confronted dramatically.

Or at minimum mildly questioned.

This was still Gotham.

Surely suspicious alley graffiti would trigger SOME kind of vigilante response.

You wait ten minutes.

Nothing.

Fifteen.

Still nothing.

A stray cat walks past and ignores you completely.

“Oh, come on,” you mutter.

By twenty minutes, your toes have gone numb.

The Red Hood does not appear from the shadows. Batman does not descend dramatically from a gargoyle. Nobody even yells at you.

Eventually you trudge home offended.

Honestly? Rude.

You committed crimes for him.

The least he could do was acknowledge them.

—

The next morning, Gotham Instagram discovers the alley.

You learn this while eating cereal in your pajamas and scrolling half-asleep through your phone.

@gotham.city.aesthetic:  ❄️ whoever made the snowflake alley downtown… i owe you my life actually

Attached is a professionally edited reel of your graffiti set to melancholy indie music.

You sit bolt upright.

“What.”

More notifications flood in.

People are taking photos there.

Someone proposed there apparently. A local influencer called it: “a symbol of fragile beauty surviving gotham’s darkness 🥺”

There is now a location tag called: #snowflakealley

You stare at your screen in horror.

This was not the intended outcome.

This was supposed to summon Jason Todd.

Not accidentally improve Gotham morale.

—- CRIME ATTEMPT #2 —-

Mugging, you decide, is probably the fastest way to get the Red Hood’s attention.

Vigilantes loved muggings. That’s how Jason and you met after all. 

Which means all you have to do is create one tiny robbery scenario where you steal from a sweet grandma and Jason will practically materialize from the shadows himself.

Perfect.

Unfortunately, Crime Alley at nine p.m. contains absolutely no muggable people. 

This city was unbelievable.

Where were the old ladies with purses?

Where were the businessmen carrying suspiciously robbable briefcases?

You specifically picked nine p.m. because movies suggested that was prime mugging time.

Instead Gotham apparently believed in bedtime.

A taxi splashes through a puddle nearby.

You sigh dramatically into your scarf.

Maybe you needed to think bigger.

Big risks equaled big rewards.

That was probably what criminals said.

Your eyes narrow on the next pedestrian approaching down the sidewalk.

Not an old lady.vBut non-threatening.

Average height. Beanie. Holding grocery bags.

You could absolutely rob that man.

Probably.

Your pulse immediately skyrockets as you step into his path.

The poor guy startles hard enough to almost drop his groceries.

“HEY,” you blurt.

Excellent opening.

Very criminal.

The man blinks at you cautiously.

“…Hi?”

Okay.

Commit.

You square your shoulders and point at him dramatically.

“Hand over your money.”

Silence.

A car alarm chirps somewhere in the distance.

The man stares at you for a long moment. “Are you lost?” he says.

You panic slightly.

Stay focused.

You lower your voice another octave, which unfortunately just makes you sound congested.

“Give me money.”

The man’s expression shifts instantly from confused to deeply concerned.

“I mean…” He adjusts the grocery bags awkwardly. “I can buy you a bus ticket if you need help?”

You stare at him.

“No,” you say carefully. “This is a robbery.”

The man goes pale. “Oh my god.”

Finally.

Recognition.

Fear.

Respect.

“You’re being robbed?”

“What?”

His gaze darts around the alley frantically. “Did somebody take your wallet? Are they still here?”

“No! I’m robbing YOU.”

Then his entire expression softens in a way that immediately offends you.

He lowers his grocery bags carefully onto the pavement like he’s approaching a frightened animal.

“Okay, sweetheart,” he says cautiously. “Can I call someone for you?”

You stare at him.

“What.”

“A friend? Your parents? Somebody who can pick you up?”

“I’m committing a CRIME.”

“You seem overwhelmed.”

“I’m threatening you!”

Before you can recover, headlights suddenly sweep across the alley.

A police cruiser rolls slowly past the entrance.

The man’s eyes widen immediately. “Oh thank god.”

“No no no no—”

The cruiser stops.

A cop steps out, one hand already resting near his belt while he looks between the two of you.

The man points directly at you.

“This poor girl needs help.”

You actually recoil. “WHAT.”

The officer’s expression shifts instantly into concern.

“Miss?” he asks carefully. “Are you alright?”

“I’m robbing him.”

The cop blinks once.

The man gives him a deeply sympathetic look. “I think she’s having some kind of episode.”

“I AM ACTIVELY THREATENING YOU.”

“You’re shivering pretty badly,” the officer notes gently.

“That’s because crime is stressful!”

Ten minutes later, you are sitting in the back of the police cruiser wrapped in an emergency blanket while the officer gives you hotline numbers and tells you that “vigilante-adjacent emotional situations” are more common than people think.

—-

By late Christmas eve, you are officially out of ideas.

Crime has failed you.

The Gotham Police Department had gently encouraged therapy.

And Jason Todd was still ignoring every single attempt you made to reach him.

Which meant you were now curled sideways in his armchair in the reading nook at one in the morning feeling deeply, catastrophically pathetic.

Fatson Todd is tucked beneath one arm like emotional support artillery while snow taps softly against the apartment windows.

Your chest aches.

Maybe honesty really is the best policy.

No more crimes. No more emotional terrorism. No more failed muggings.

Just try talking to him.

You open Twitter for the first time in years because it’s probably the only place where he hasn’t blocked you yet. You smile when you see the handle. @boomeringue. It used to be the username you used for everything from twitter to club penguin. 

You try to keep it brief. You don’t want to seem overbearing: 

@redhood city square. christmas eve. 8pm.

You stare at the tweet for a long moment before hitting post.

Hopefully, by some miracle, he’ll see it and you can finally talk. 

—

Wayne Manor is miserable on Christmas Eve.

The tree is lit. The garlands are up. There’s music playing softly somewhere down the hall.

And yet the entire manor somehow feels like somebody kicked a puppy directly into the holiday spirit.

Jason is sitting in the armchair nearest the fire looking like human seasonal depression in a leather jacket. Which means everyone else is suffering too.

Dick breaks first. “This sucks,” he announces.

Nobody disagrees.

Even Alfred pauses briefly while serving dessert.

“Master Richard,” he says diplomatically.

“No offence, Alfred,” Dick says immediately, “but if she was here we’d have chocolate mousse right now instead of fruitcake.”

“None taken, sir.”

Tim pokes at his slice with visible despair. “She would’ve decorated the cookies.”

“She would’ve made hot chocolate,” Steph mourns.

“She would have laughed at my joke about superman and mistletoe," Duke adds quietly.

Damian scowls down at his tea. “Todd has ruined morale.”

Jason doesn’t look up from the glass in his hand.

“Can all of you shut up.”

“No,” Dick says instantly. “This is weird. You’re weird.”

Jason’s jaw tightens.

For the last week he has been moody, snappy, and Cass once caught him sobbing to All too Well on his bike. 

Which, in fairness, narrows his behavior down very little.

Steph finally snaps.

“Okay, I’m saying it,” she declares. “Go apologize to your girlfriend.”

Jason’s expression hardens instantly.

“She’s not my girlfriend.”

“Oh my god,” Tim mutters.

“And she’s not my soulmate,” Jason says flatly. “Drop it.”

Silence falls across the room.

Even Alfred stops moving for half a second.

Dick stares at him. “Jason.”

“I mean it.”

Something ugly twists briefly across Jason’s face before disappearing behind that familiar hard expression again.

“We got confused,” he says shortly. “That’s all.”

Nobody responds immediately because that explanation makes absolutely no sense and noody believes it. 

And because Bruce, unfortunately, now looks like he wants to have a father-son conversation.

Before that catastrophe can occur—

Ping

Barbara’s laptop lights up on the coffee table.

Everyone turns automatically.

Barbara frowns down at the incoming alert. “That’s weird.”

“What?” Duke asks.

She opens the file.

Then immediately straightens.

“Oh, that’s bad timing.”

The room shifts instantly.

Jason sits forward slightly. Bruce is already on his feet.

Barbara answers the incoming GCPD call on speaker. “Oracle.”

“We’ve got a flagged threat tied to tonight’s Christmas market,” a dispatcher says quickly. “Cybercrimes escalated it to major incidents.”

Barbara’s eyes skim rapidly across the report.

The dispatcher lowers his voice ominously.

“We think the suspect may be operating under the alias Eringue.”

Silence.

“Potential extremist,” the dispatcher continues confidently. “Possibly foreign.”

Bruce’s expression sharpens immediately. “What’s the threat level?”

“Potential bombing,” Barbara says grimly. “Christmas Eve market. High civilian density.”

That gets everyone moving instantly.

Finally,

Action.

Dick stands so fast he nearly knocks over the fruitcake. Duke’s already reaching for comms. Tim peers over Babs’ shoulder for the report. Damian actually looks excited for the first time all evening.

“The mayor doesn’t want the festivities disrupted publicly,” she says. “So GCPD’s sending bomb squads in plainclothes while we establish perimeter positions.”

Bruce nods once. “Assignments.”

“Nightwing and Spoiler cover east exits. Robin with Red Robin on rooftop surveillance. Signal monitors crowd movement.” Barbara pulls up the city map. “Red Hood takes the central market.”

Across the city, entirely unaware you had accidentally triggered Gotham’s anti-terror response, you were standing in a flower shop holding two bouquets with increasing distress.

“Do these look too breakup-y?” you asked nervously.

The cashier blinked. “The… roses?”

“No, roses are romantic.” You frowned down at the white lilies in your other hand. “The lilies feel profound.”

Outside, Gotham police quietly established a bomb perimeter around the Christmas market.

You picked carnations.

—

The Gotham Christmas market is operating under active anti-terror surveillance.

Fortunately, none of the civilians know that.

Families drift between vendor stalls beneath glowing string lights while Christmas music crackles softly through overhead speakers. Kids clutch cups of hot chocolate with mittened hands. Someone nearby is aggressively roasting chestnuts.

Meanwhile every available vigilante in Gotham is perched somewhere overhead waiting for a potential bombing.

“East side clear,” Nightwing says through comms.

“Couple arguing near the skating rink,” Spoiler adds. “The boyfriend definitely cheated but probably not terrorism related.”

Robin crouches at the edge of a rooftop overlooking the market, cape snapping sharply in the winter wind.

“A man near the fountain has been pacing for seven minutes,” Damian reports.

Red Robin glances down at his scanner. “He’s waiting for his wife. Elevated heart rate but no weapon signatures.”

“Disappointing,” Damian mutters.

Below them, plainclothes bomb squad officers weave carefully through the crowd pretending to browse holiday stalls.

Oracle’s voice cuts cleanly through the comm network.

“Reminder: the mayor's office does not want panic. Keep movement controlled unless we confirm a threat.”

Jason stands on a roof closest to the square with his helmet on, arms crossed tightly over his chest while snow drifts slowly onto his jacket.

“West perimeter,” Signal says suddenly. “Guy in the green parka keeps touching his pockets.”

Jason’s attention snaps over immediately.

The man pulls out:

“A candy cane,” Nightwing sighs.

“Oh come ON,” Steph groans.

A child drops hot chocolate nearby. Jason flinches instinctively at the sound hitting pavement.

Oracle’s voice crackles suddenly through the comms.

“Hold.”

Every channel goes quiet instantly.

Barbara’s typing echoes faintly in the background before she says:

“Red Hood.”

Jason straightens automatically. “What.”

“Your soulmate just entered through the west gate. I see it on camera three.”

Silence detonates across the network.

Every Bat immediately turns toward the west entrance.

Jason’s stomach drops hard enough to hurt.

“No,” he says instantly.

And then he sees you.

Winter coat. Scarf. Flowers tucked carefully against your chest.

Flowers?

Nightwing squints through binoculars from the rooftop.

“…Is she on a date?”

Jason’s grip tightens so hard around his gun holster it creaks.

Spoiler gasps dramatically. “OH MY GOD SHE’S ON A DATE.”

“She brought flowers,” Duke says weakly.

“Perhaps she finally located a man with emotional intelligence,” Damian offers.

Jason genuinely considers violence.

Not because you’re on a date.

You should be on a date.

You should move on from this entire disaster and find someone normal and alive and uncomplicated who doesn’t vanish for two weeks because he’s too damaged to process affection correctly.

Still. It's been two weeks.. Did you move on that quick?

The sight of those flowers in your hands makes something ugly twist low in his chest.

Dick’s voice softens slightly. “Jay…”

“She deserves better,” Jason says flatly before anyone can say it first.

The words land heavily across the comms.

For one brief second, nobody jokes. Then Oracle cuts through the silence sharply.

“Can you people be serious for ONE second?”

Barbara sounds genuinely appalled.

“There is an active potential bomb threat at this location,” she snaps. “And his soulmate is standing in the middle of it.”

Jason freezes.

Right.

The threat.

Your flowers suddenly stop looking romantic and start looking terrifyingly vulnerable.

Oracle’s voice hardens instantly into mission mode.

“Red Hood, get her out of there now.”

Jason moves before anyone can say another word.

“One minute,” Batman says sharply through comms.

Jason ignores him completely.

The rooftop door slams hard enough behind him to rattle the stairwell as he tears downward three steps at a time. Snow and cold air still cling to his armor while Oracle continues talking in his ear about evacuation routes and threat containment.

He barely hears her.

All he can think about is you standing in the middle of a potential bombing with flowers in your hands.

Idiot.

His idiot.

Jason yanks the helmet off halfway down the stairs and shoves it into an abandoned maintenance cabinet without slowing. Next go the guns. Holstered beneath his jacket where civilians won’t see them.

By the time he hits street level, he barely looks like Red Hood at all.

Just Jason.

Just a man sprinting through Gotham Christmas crowds with panic clawing up his throat.

He spots you near the center fountain immediately.

You’re standing on your toes slightly, scanning the market crowd with your bouquet tucked against your chest. When he shouts your name. Your head snaps toward him instantly.

Your entire face lights up.

Relief crashes across your expression so openly and immediately it almost stops him in his tracks.

“Jason!”

You hurry toward him through the crowd, smiling so brightly it physically hurts to look at after two weeks of silence.

Jason reaches you and immediately grabs your hand.

“We need to go,” he says.

“What?”

“There’s a threat. C’mon.”

He starts pulling you quickly through the market crowd toward the nearest exit, grip tight around your wrist while his eyes scan rooftops and civilians automatically.

Behind him, Oracle is feeding him updates through comms.

“No suspicious movement near the north barricade—”

“Bomb squad entering west side—”

“Red Hood, keep moving.”

You stumble slightly trying to keep up.

“Jason, wait”

“No time.”

“What do you MEAN no time??”

“There’s a potential attack here.”

Your eyes widen instantly.

“Oh my god.”

“Exactly.”

Jason keeps moving, pulse pounding violently now.

If something goes off before he gets you clear—

“Jason,” you say again, tugging against his hand this time. “Wait, hold on.”

“We are literally not holding on.”

“No, listen to me first!”

Jason finally slows just enough to look back at you.

You stare up at him, confused now.

“…Did you get my message?”

Jason pauses.

The crowd noise dulls strangely around him.

“…What message?”

“The tweet,” you repeat slowly. “I asked you to meet me here at 8”

Jason stares.

Snow drifts lazily between the market lights while Gotham continues bustling around you completely oblivious to the active anti-terror operation currently unfolding in the background.

“You…” Jason says faintly. “You sent that?”

“Yes?” Your eyebrows knit together. “Why else would you be here?”

Oh my god.

Behind Jason, somewhere across the rooftops, half the Batfamily is currently preparing for a bombing because of a twitter account you made when you were 12.

You keep talking before he can process that information.

You shift awkwardly beneath his silence.

“…Okay, well now I feel stupid,” you mutter. “But you blocked my number, which was honestly insane behavior by the way, and nobody would tell me where you lived, and I even tried the cookie cooler thing again but homeless people stole them—”

Jason actually stops breathing for a second.

“Who?.”

“That’s not important.” You wave it off immediately. “The point is I had to escalate.” You sound genuinely defensive about this.

Jason’s eyes sting suddenly. There is no threat. For a moment when he saw you standing there, he was terrified. All his neurons fired with a single message of get her out. 

He pulls you into him so suddenly you gasp.

The bouquet crushes awkwardly between your coats while his arms lock around you hard enough to almost lift you off the ground. Jason buries his face against your hair immediately like he’s trying to convince himself you’re real.

His shoulders shake once.

“Oh,” you say softly.

His breath catches sharply against your temple.

“I missed you.” You keep talking. “I almost became a criminal.”

“Almost?”

“I jaywalked.”

“…Oh my god.”

“And then I did graffiti but it accidentally became an Instagram spot instead of a threat to society.”

You keep ranting on but Jason is barely hanging onto your words because a realization washes over him like warm water. You came here for him.