cafeoa

[cafeoa]

deja vu

pairing: johnny storm x female reader

synopsis: in another world, johnny storm lost you before he could say he loved you. in this one, he’s found you again—and he’s not letting go.

requested by: @ceylon-morphe

You don’t notice him at first.

It’s a small mercy, the way New York folds its famous people into its noise. The Baxter Building is the kind of place where delivery guys take selfies in the lobby and a school field trip turns into a stampede when Ben Grimm waves from the mezzanine, but you’re only here for the public lecture in the little auditorium, “An Evening With the Fantastic Four: Science for a City.” Extra credit if you write a reflection. You came alone. You always do.

There’s a coffee cart tucked behind a structural pillar on the second floor, where the atrium’s light pours down like honey. You’re in a line of four, scrolling through a reading about mythic syncretism you’re absolutely not going to retain, and you order without looking up. Iced, oat milk, one pump vanilla. The barista slips a lid on and pushes it across the counter.

A warm shape moves into your peripheral vision. You step back to make space and a man says, soft, “That’s your order,” like maybe you’ve grabbed the wrong drink.

You look up because something in you answers to that voice, like a struck match turns. He’s got the kind of face that looks familiar because you’ve seen it on a hundred magazine covers and in a thousand reaction memes. But it’s not the celebrity recognition that knocks the breath out of you. It’s how he’s looking.

He knows how to be looked at. You can tell from the slow, careful way he stands, an instinctive framing for cameras. But right now he isn’t performing. He’s bracing.

His hand hovers an inch from the drink. The way people do when they’re offering something sacred and asking permission. When your eyes lift to his, the blue hits first—clear as pool water at noon, rimmed with dark lashes, so bright they look almost impossible in this dull fluorescent halo. Those eyes lock on you like they’ve found a star they thought burned out.

“I, uh— sorry,” he tries again, and there’s a half-smile that doesn’t know if it has the right to exist. “You always put the lid on before the straws here. I forget. Every time.”

“Every time?” You don’t mean it to sound like a challenge, but it slips out dry and curious. “You’re a regular?”

“Painfully,” he says. The corner of his mouth twitches. There’s a small rustle behind you as the line shuffles forward. He sidesteps to clear the lane without taking his eyes off you, like moving too fast might spook something. “You like it iced. Oat milk. One pump vanilla.”

You blink. “Do I?”

He flinches like you’ve thrown a pebble that found a bruise. “I— it’s on your ticket.” He nods toward the little sticker. “Sorry. Not a— not a weird thing to say.” His voice lowers, careful. “Are you here for Sue’s talk?”

The auditorium doors sigh open down the hall. You bounce the cup against your palm to shake the ice and study him. He doesn’t push. And that’s what makes you believe him a little. The ones who want something push.

“I am,” you say. “You?”

“Every time,” he repeats, softer, as if he’s decided to lean into whatever this is. “I’m Johnny.”

“I know.” You smile because it feels rude not to. “I’m… Y/N. Hi.”

His mouth pulls into a genuine curve that looks like sunlight caught in the crook of his lips. The blue of his eyes warms, like the color itself leans closer. “Hi, Y/N.”

He lets you walk ahead. He follows with that averted, attentive air— a careful distance that feels like orbit, not chase.

In the auditorium you sit in the aisle because you hate being trapped in the middle. You open your notebook and date the top corner like you always do. He slips into the row behind you and one seat over like maybe you won’t notice him if he’s not directly behind your shoulder. He doesn’t take out a phone. He looks at the stage with his hands folded, as if sitting in a church pew. When the lights dim, a bit of glow from the exit signs finds his profile, and for one weird second you think, those eyes would be so easy to believe.

Susan Storm enters with Reed and Ben, and the place erupts. She laughs and raises a hand, calm and generous. Reed fumbles with a remote, grimly cheerful. Ben whoops. The kids scream. The lights dim. The talk begins.

You take notes on superconductors and civic infrastructure. You draw a little diagram of a bridge that could cool itself. You don’t turn around. But you know he’s there. You know the precise shape of his quiet.

When the Q&A ends and the crowd dissolves toward the doors, you feel a weight like a hand pressed to your back. You expect he’ll leave you alone. Famous people don’t have to linger. But in the hallway you catch a glimpse of him standing a little off to the side, as if he’s waiting for someone who might not arrive, and when your eyes flick, his do too. He brightens like a struck match and then dims himself, like he’s trained not to burn too bright.

“Did you like it?” he asks.

“I did.” You shoulder your bag. “Your sister is intimidatingly cool.”

“She is.” He sighs like it’s the best worst problem in the world. “You here for school?”

“Yes.” You almost add: just trying to get through. Instead you say, “A paper. I’m on a deadline.”

“You like deadlines?”

You snort. “No one likes deadlines.”

“I do.” His smile turns lopsided. “They make things real.”

He keeps making room for you. It takes you longer than you’d like to realize that’s what it is. He falls into step without crowding. He presses a hand to the elevator door for a woman with a stroller. He tells a kid who waves that the kid’s Spider-Man shirt is objectively the best on the market right now, and when the kid screeches, Johnny winces and looks at you like he’s been too loud. Like he’s afraid to scare you away. Those blue eyes keep flicking to you, easing every time you don’t bolt.

“Do you—” he starts when you reach the lobby, then stops. “Never mind.”

You pivot, slow. “Do I what?”

He swallows. You watch his throat move. “Do you want me to call you a car? It’s late and… the cabs around here are—”

“I’m taking the subway,” you say.

His smile is immediate and helpless. The blue brightens; it’s almost unfair how readable he is. “Of course you are.”

You lift a brow. “What does that mean?”

“Nothing.” He raises his hands. “It’s just very… you.”

“We’ve known each other for fifteen minutes.”

“Some things,” he says, barely audible, “you just know.”

You study him a beat too long. His eyes— bright summer, clear and impossible. There’s a look in them you can’t name, and you don’t trust things you can’t name. You tuck your hair behind your ear and step back. “It was nice meeting you, Johnny.”

He nods, a careful nod that says he’s leaving you the choice. “It was nice. Y/N.”

He doesn’t ask for your number. He doesn’t chase you to the revolving doors. He stands in the middle of the lobby and watches you go as if you’re a constellation he has to memorize before the clouds come in.

You don’t think about him on the train.

That’s a lie. You think about the way he stood like he’d been taught to hold still. You think about the hunger he didn’t let show. You think about the way you wanted to ask him why he looked relieved when you said oat milk, one pump vanilla, as if you’d confirmed a secret password. You think about the blue of his eyes like a secret his face forgot to keep.

You drink your coffee through melted ice and tell yourself it doesn’t matter.

Two days later, you see him again.

It’s at the campus café this time, because the city is a series of spirals and you always eventually wind up at the same points. You’re in a booth with a stack of printouts, highlighter uncapped, a headache simmering behind your eyes. The line winds past your table, and the room smells like espresso and dust. When a shadow falls across your page, you look up expecting a stranger asking for the spare chair.

“Please don’t be mad,” he says quietly, already braced for it. The blue looks almost gray in the indoor light, cautious, dimmed. “I asked Sue if it was okay to swing by. She said it was a free country and to tell you hi from her because she thinks you’re smart.”

You blink at him. “You talked to your sister about me?”

“Not like that.” He flushes. It’s disarming, actually— how quick it rises under his skin, the honesty of it. “I mentioned you. She asked if I made a friend. I said I didn’t know if— I—” He exhales. Abandons the sentence. “Can I sit?”

You should say no. You know you should. But some stubborn, suspicious part of you wants to know what he’ll do if you say yes. Will he push? Will he take? Will he turn you into a story he tells his friends?

“Okay,” you say, and tilt your head at the opposite bench. “For a little.”

He slides in like he’s been asked to take communion. He doesn’t crowd your papers. He sets his hands on his knees, leans forward, and looks at the highlighted paragraph like it might explain you. A lock of hair falls into his eyes. The blue flicks down and up with your page, tracking. You try not to notice the way his lashes are absurd.

“What are you reading?” he asks.

“Stuff I don’t understand yet.”

“Do you want help?” he says, reflexive, rueful. “I can’t offer any, I’m just— it’s a thing I say.”

“You like being useful,” you say without meaning to.

He goes still. The blue steadies, focused. “Sometimes,” he admits, slowly, like he’s learning what he means as he says it, “it’s the only time I feel like myself.”

You look at him properly. Not like a famous face, not like a story. Like a person who said a thing that felt truer than maybe he meant to. His hands are steady on his knees. His joints look held together by will.

“What do you feel like the rest of the time?” you ask softly.

He meets your eyes. For a heartbeat, the blue is bare—no tricks, no stage lights. Like a door cracks in a corridor you didn’t know you were walking and light hits your shoulder.

“A memory,” he says, and then he looks away. “Sorry. That got weird.”

“It didn’t,” you say, and it doesn’t.

He orders nothing. He doesn’t mention the coffee you’re not drinking because it’s gone watery. He sits for forty minutes while you pretend to read and actually learn his stillness. His phone buzzes once and he silences it without checking the screen. When you close your folder he straightens, brightens, and then immediately tamps it down like he’s on a dimmer switch.

“Walk you out?” he asks.

You sigh, but not at him. At yourself, maybe. “Sure.”

He doesn’t reach for your bag. He keeps pace with your steps. He asks you what class you’re headed to and listens to your answer like there isn’t a single thing in the world he’d rather do.

At the corner, you stop. He stuffs his hands in his jacket pockets, shoulders curling like he’s cold. He’s not. He radiates heat enough to blur the air on summer days; the tabloids have prints of wide-eyed girls, hand over hearts, sweaty-faced and delirious after he’s given them a high five. But right now he looks like he’s standing on a dock staring at a boat he’s not sure will let him onboard.

“Johnny.” You say his name before he says yours, which makes him look like he might drown. “Are you okay?”

He nods too fast. “Yes.”

“You sure?”

He nods again, and this one is smaller. He looks at your mouth like he’s learning the shape of a word he’s never said out loud. “If I do something wrong, tell me.” He swallows. Those blue eyes flicker up, naked and pleading and stubborn all at once. “Please.”

“Wrong?” you ask, wary.

“If I call too much and you don’t like it,” he says, and then flinches, corrects himself without your prompting. “If I call. At all. If I show up where you are. I—” He squeezes his eyes shut for a breath. “I’m trying not to be too much.”

“What if I’m not mine?” you ask lightly, and then wince. You didn’t mean to cut him like that. You didn’t mean to throw a knife at a soft underbelly you don’t even know yet. “I mean— I didn’t mean—”

He watches you with a sorrow that’s too old for his face. The blue softens, goes dark around the edges. “You are,” he says. “You are yours.”

You don’t give him your number that day either. He doesn’t ask.

He finds you anyway.

Not like a shadow, not like a watcher. More like a recurring dream. He appears at the ends of your days, when the library flickers its lights and you feel like the last person awake in a sleeping city. He walks you to the subway and talks about nothing— about Ben learning to make sourdough, about Reed’s ridiculous attempts to build a toaster that can calculate bagel density, about Sue teaching Franklin to braid. When you laugh— and you do— his eyes go bright and glassy, summer-sky blue after rain, like he’s hearing a song he thought he lost.

Every time you catch him looking at you, it’s the same look. Men have looked at you a lot of ways. You know guilt when you see it, lust, classification, curiosity. Johnny’s gaze is none of those. It’s reverent. And scared. Like he’s memorizing a prayer, afraid someone’s going to snatch the book out of his hands. The blue in his eyes holds a cathedral’s quiet.

He doesn’t touch you, not really. The back of his hand might graze yours when you turn the same way in a revolving door. His shoulder might bump yours when a delivery guy barrels through a crosswalk and he moves you without thinking. But he never assumes. He never reaches.

You ask him why, finally, because the question sits in your mouth like a pebble and your teeth have been grinding. You’re on a bench in the park near your apartment, his cap pulled low and your knee bouncing under your coat. A boy skates past with a dog towing him. The last of winter turns to slush under shuddering trees.

“Why won’t you—” you start, then catch your own breath and reconsider the shape of the ask. “Why do you act like I’m… breakable?”

He looks at your hands. His voice is roughened down. “Because the last time I held you,” he says, a confession, not an explanation, “you were.”

The world blinks.

You stare at him because there are a thousand answers you expected, and none of them were that. “The last time you… what?”

He swallows. A muscle ticks at his jaw. He looks like a man standing at the edge of a cliff with the understanding that to jump will hurt and to stay will kill him slow. When he lifts his eyes, the blue is raw, storm-lit. He’s not hiding behind it anymore.

“I don’t want to hurt you,” he says. “I don’t want to make you carry something that isn’t yours.”

“Try me,” you say, because the truth is you are a person who hates doors left half-open, and if he’s going to haunt your evenings, you need to know what ghost he’s carrying behind his ribs.

He nods once. You watch the movement like you’ve been waiting for it.

“Not here,” he says softly. “Please.”

He takes you to the Baxter Building like you’re an invited guest. The guard greets him by name and looks at you with a quick, friendly curiosity, the kind that doesn’t assume. In the elevator he stands right beside you without touching, the way someone stands beside a hospital bed and prays without letting their fingers brush the sheet. The stainless walls throw back a thin reflection; the blue of his eyes shocks you again, small and bright in the mirrored metal.

He leads you not to the atrium or the lab with its gleaming chatter, but to a smaller room with a slanted ceiling and a window that cuts the dusk into blue pieces. There are framed photos on the wall and a shelf of records. A couch with a crocheted blanket. It’s home, not show.

“Johnny,” you say, because something about the way he closes the door as if he’s sealing a mouth makes your heart climb into your throat.

He sits— no, perches— on the edge of the couch and clasps his hands between his knees. His eyes go somewhere you can’t follow, and then he drags them back with visible effort to look at you.

“I knew you,” he says. “Not you. Another you. A different… world.” He doesn’t check to see if you believe in multiverses. He doesn’t cushion it. He says it like he’s naming the weather. “They called it Earth-828. I don’t know if that’s true or just what Reed wrote on a whiteboard. You were…” His mouth pulls. “You were famous.”

You raise a brow because this is the point where a person you might be in another universe would laugh and say of course I was. But the look on his face stops you, because it’s not fond. It’s not proud. It’s a memory that’s wearing grief like a winter coat.

“You sang,” he says, soft. “You had this dress with a scalloped hem. You liked your coffee iced, oat milk, one pump vanilla. You laughed like someone who grew up in kitchens and learned to talk over boiling pots. You—” He breathes. The blue thins, goes watery with unshed heat. “You liked me.”

For the first time since you’ve known him, his eyes lift to meet yours and don’t drop away. If anything, they climb.

“I did not tell you,” he says, and the ragged admission tears something in your chest, “that I loved you. And then the sky broke.”

He tells you like he’s talking through a door, not to the past but to the person he used to be. He tells you about sound like a cathedral collapsing, about light that burned without heat, about Reed shouting numbers he could taste in his mouth like metal. He tells you about a teleporter misaligned by forces they didn’t yet understand, a room that he’s walked into a thousand times since but only remembers in a single blink because the second blink didn’t happen fast enough.

“She laughed,” he says, and he’s not looking at you anymore. The blue is far away, lit by a different sun. “You laughed, because you always laughed when we were about to do something stupid and brave. And then—”

He lifts his hands, palms up. There are no burns on them. That day left him whole in every way that matters and ruined him in every way that counts.

“And then the light took you,” he says. “And I didn’t tell you. And I didn’t get to— I didn’t get to hold your hand and say your name in the way that means all the things it needed to mean. And I have been—” He gropes for the word and finds one too simple. “I have been tired since.”

You sit down slowly. The couch gives. The blanket scratches the back of your knee. You taste vanilla and summer on a winter night and wonder when you drank anything last.

He looks at you, and there it is again— that look. Not need. Not hunger. A cathedral of sorrow and a pew saved for you. As if he’s the old man on the porch with the high school photo, and he’s finally allowed to tell someone the story of the girl he loved. The blue settles back on you, not pleading—faithful.

“I’m not her,” you say, because you have to. It comes out gentler than you expected. “Johnny. I’m not her.”

He nods like the sea. He nods like prayer. He drops his eyes and nods again. “I know.”

“Do you?”

“Yes.” He licks his bottom lip like he’s tasting the right next word. “You wear pants more than skirts. You hate anyone taking a picture if you didn’t mean to be in it. You have a chipped mug with a fox on it. You love street fairs but you don’t like fireworks. You… you tell the truth even when you don’t want to. You don’t sing when you wash dishes.”

Some traitorous part of you wants to say I sing sometimes, but that’s the part that loves to hurt itself, so you clamp your jaw and breathe.

“You’re trying to make me the same,” you say. “Even if you don’t mean to.”

“Yes.” He doesn’t move to deny it, doesn’t dress it in better clothing. The blue goes unflinching. “I am. Because it hurts less that way. Because it means I’m not crazy. Because it means the story gets an end I can breathe around.”

“And what if I don’t want to be your ending?” The edge in your voice arrives like rain; you didn’t feel it building until you’re soaked. “What if I’m not your second chance, Johnny? What if I’m just— me. What if I never sing or wear scalloped hems. What if I graduate and move and you’re not on the way to anything.”

His face is a wrecked shoreline. You can see the wave hit and pull back. Those blue eyes shine like glass tossed in surf.

“Then,” he says hoarsely, “I’ll be happy you lived.”

You don’t realize you’re crying until you taste salt. He doesn’t move to wipe it away. He watches like he doesn’t trust his hands. You hate him for that, a little. You hate him for respecting a boundary you didn’t draw in marker.

“Don’t look at me like that,” you whisper. “Please.”

“Like what?”

“Like I’m going to disappear if you blink.”

His voice is sandpaper and cinnamon. “It’s hard to unlearn.”

You nod once. “Try harder.”

He does.

It looks like space. That’s the thing that surprises you. Grief clings. It whispers that if you loosen your grip, everything you held will float away. But Johnny is— stubborn. You can feel it in the way he changes. He stops appearing and starts asking. Can I see you. Can I call. Can I send you something that reminded me of you. He does not share everything he feels, because it would drown you. He shares less than you can tell he wants to, because he is learning which words are yours to ask for.

He shows you the room with the slanted ceiling and teaches you how to drop the needle on a record without scratching it. He lets you pick an album without making a sound about what you pick. He brings you coffee that’s iced even when it’s snowing, because that’s how you like it, and when you order it hot one day because your throat hurts, he adjusts reality in the middle of a sentence as if he’s changing plane mid-flight.

You learn his quiet in different languages. There’s the quiet that means I’m thinking about you and trying not to say it out loud because I promised. There’s the quiet that means I remembered something I can’t bring to the table because it isn’t food, it’s a wound. And there’s the quiet that means I am here, all the way, and I want to put my hand on the couch cushion next to your thigh and feel the heat through the space between.

The world knows him as wide-open. His friends know him as loud. But you get something else, a sliver of winter sun through a kitchen window. You sit in it until your bones are warm. Sometimes when you look up from your book and catch him watching you, the blue is soft as dusk, like the color itself is exhaling.

Then you break his heart.

Not on purpose. But cleanly. Which is worse, maybe.

It happens in the lab, because Reed offered to let you see the observatory deck and you said yes because the view of the river on certain afternoons makes the whole city look like it’s been set in amber. You go through a room with a glass wall and a scaffold of silver running up to the ceiling. There’s a faint smell like ozone and orange rind.

Johnny slows as you pass the door and goes very still, and then keeps moving, too quick. You catch his sleeve.

“What’s that?”

“Nothing,” he says, like a liar who hates himself.

You look again. There’s nothing remarkable about the room if you don’t know what to look for. But you’ve lived long enough beside other people’s ghosts to recognize a tomb when you feel one. The hair on your arms rises.

“What is it,” you say, and your voice isn’t gentle because some truths scatter if you whisper them and you don’t intend to let this one get away.

He looks at the floor. He looks at the ceiling. He looks at your mouth. You can watch the arguments array themselves and fall apart. Finally, he opens the door.

The quiet inside is a different species. It clings to the corners, charged. Reed has kept it sterile. Sue has kept it simple. Ben keeps sticky notes on the console with his blocky handwriting: don’t forget to eat, hotshot. And don’t forget to breathe.

Johnny steps inside like he’s stepping into a church, hat in hand. He presses his fingers to the console and then takes them away. The blue of his eyes goes rimmed in red.

“This is where,” he says, and swallows, “we lost her.”

Not you. Her. The pronoun is an amputation made holy by the way he holds the stump to his heart.

“I shouldn’t have brought you here,” he adds, almost to himself. “I promised—”

You turn and walk back out, because if you stay your lungs will fold. He follows, panic under his skin like sparking wire.

“I’m sorry,” he says. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to—”

“You don’t get to keep both,” you say, and it’s cruel, but kindness would gum up the gears. “You don’t get to keep a shrine and ask me to be a person.”

He flinches like you’ve slapped him. “I didn’t ask you to—”

“You did,” you say. “Every time you looked at me like I was a miracle and a miracle you can lose at any minute. Every time you told me something about her like I might adopt it. Every time you didn’t touch me because your hands remember what it felt like to hold a girl who was breaking.”

His eyes shine. He rubs his thumb across his palm like he’s trying to erase old heat. “I never wanted you to—”

“You wanted her back,” you say, and the truth lands between you with a sound like a dropped plate. “And you can’t have her. I can’t be her. I won’t be her.”

There are a thousand ways the world teaches women to make other people comfortable. You know them all. You have performed them like monologues in rooms where it didn’t matter. You do not perform them now.

“Johnny,” you say, softer because you aren’t cruel, not by nature. “Either you learn to love me or you go back to your shrine and you light your candles and you let me leave.”

He looks at you like you’ve stolen all the air and he can’t decide whether to ask for it back or thank you. The blue steadies—less panic, more choice.

“Okay,” he breathes.

“Okay what?”

“Okay,” he says again, like agreement is a password he’s learning on the spot. “Okay. I— I’ll… what you said. I’ll do that.”

“You can’t fix grief in a week.”

He nods. “I’m not going to fix it,” he says, and for the first time you believe him. “I’m going to stop asking you to carry it.”

You give him your number that night.

He doesn’t send you a barrage of texts. He sends you two a day, maybe three. One in the morning that is sometimes a photo of the sky and sometimes a screenshot of something ridiculous Franklin said. One in the evening that is sometimes a link to a song that makes him think of the way you tap your index finger against the lid of your iced coffee when you’re thinking. There are days he sends nothing. You find that you miss him in a way that doesn’t scare you. You find that you want to tell him when you see a dog on the subway wearing a sweater with strawberries.

He takes you to a street fair and doesn’t flinch when a vendor shoots confetti into the air. He takes your hand when the crowd surges and his palm is warm and steady, and he doesn’t grip like he’s afraid you’ll go. He just… holds you. Like a person moving through a crowd with another person they like. When you glance up, his blue eyes are crinkled, content; no fear in them, just the pleasure of being where you are.

Ben finds you in the kitchen one afternoon, leaning against the counter eating half a sleeve of cookies because you forgot lunch, and he says, “So you’re the one,” in a voice that would be gravel if gravel could be gentle.

“I’m a one,” you say. “I don’t know about the.”

He grins. “Good answer. He’s a good kid.”

“He’s older than me.”

“Not where it counts.” Ben tips the cookie box at you. “He’s an idiot about the big stuff and a genius about the small stuff. Don’t let him get away with it. He needs bosses in his life.”

“I’m not here to parent him,” you say. “I’m here to—” You stop, cheeks warming, because you don’t know what word to pick. Date. Try. Heal something that isn’t yours by letting the air touch it.

“Uh-huh,” Ben says. “You like him.”

“I… do.”

“Scary, that.” Ben’s eyes soften in his rock face. “For you and him.”

“Does he… do this a lot?”

“Feel things?” Ben shrugs. “He’s a feeler. He just doesn’t always know how to say them without setting something on fire. This time he’s trying not to set you on fire. That’s new.”

“High bar,” you mutter.

Ben laughs. “Listen. He’s a good kid. Don’t let him tell himself he’s a story somebody told him. Make him be the guy in the room. You get me?”

“I get you,” you say, and you do.

Reed is a different conversation, as it always is. He corners you near a whiteboard and starts a sentence in English and finishes it in theory. “It’s extraordinary,” he says in a tone that could be about astrophysics or the weather. “The multiversal recursion of personality traits. Not total— of course not, we’re not— but the echoes. The coffee order alone— statistically improbable that your palatal preference would—”

“Reed,” Sue says from the doorway, fond and exasperated. “People are not lab notes.”

“Sorry,” Reed says, not sounding sorry. He clears his throat. “It is incredible luck that you and Johnny have crossed paths in this way.”

“She’s not a coincidence,” Sue says, and kisses her husband’s cheek as she passes him a mug of tea. She looks at you the way an older sister looks if she’s decided to be on your side before you’ve earned it. “She’s a person. A good one, if she can handle Johnny’s… intensity.”

“I can handle my own intensity,” Johnny mutters, but when he meets your eyes he looks grateful that someone else said it. The blue does that soft, shy flare that makes your chest ache.

Franklin tugs your sleeve and shows you a drawing he made of a rocket ship with a stick figure inside waving. “Is that you?” you ask.

“It’s Uncle Johnny,” he says. Then he leans conspiratorially, loud-whispering, “He was sad, but now he’s not so much.”

“Why?” you whisper back.

“Because he found something,” Franklin says, and then considers. “Maybe someone.”

You look away because your face is going to do something embarrassing. Johnny is at the counter, passing Sue the bowl of salad, his mouth soft, his shoulders low. The look on his face when he glances over his shoulder and catches you looking is not a miracle someone’s going to take away. It’s the ordinary pleasure of seeing the person you like in your kitchen. The blue brightens a fraction, like an answer you can read.

You wait for the other shoe and you don’t have to wait long.

It drops on a Tuesday in April, a drizzle day where the city is the color of old nickels and your phone battery keeps lying to you. You’re walking toward a café because you told him you’d meet there after his press thing, and you’re thinking about nothing in particular because if you think about the future you start planning for contingencies and you promised yourself this time you’d let a day be a day.

Johnny steps out of a black car in a navy suit like the sky put on clothes. Photographers pop like hail. He does what celebrities do: he makes it look easy. And then his eyes cut through the crowd like a field bending in wind and find you.

It happens in the space of a subway breath. You see it as clearly as your own hand: the way his gaze slams into you and then softens like taffy under heat. He tells the world, with his face, the thing he hasn’t said with his mouth. The photographers see it, because part of their job is reading eyes, and for a second the snapping slows. The blue is unguarded, so nakedly relieved that you have to look down.

Then a flash goes off right in his face. He startles, actually startles, like a horse, which would be funny if it didn’t send a jagged line through your sternum. His hand lifts, reaches. Not for you— not to drag you into the story— but for something that isn’t there at all. A phantom rope. A hand he didn’t get to hold.

Your stomach drops into your shoes.

You sidestep into a doorway and breathe like you forgot how for a minute. When he arrives— because of course he does— you let him kiss your cheek and you smell rain on his collar. His laugh is too easy. The way he says hey is too much like please.

“What?” he says, pocketing his hands like a boy who doesn’t know what to do with them if they’re not holding fire. “What is it?”

“You panicked,” you say.

He blinks. The act drops out of him like a shell. “When?”

“When the light hit.” You consider your words with care, because you have learned that there are detonators only he can disarm. “Who did you reach for?”

He looks like he wants to lie. You watch him choose not to. “You,” he says, and the word is a question and an apology and a wish.

“Which me?”

He closes his eyes. When he opens them, the blue is sea-deep and bare.

“Johnny.” You put your hand on his sleeve because you’re not heartless. “Look at me.”

He does. It costs him something and you feel it hit your bones like the dull thunk of an elevator calling its floor.

“I need you to hear this and actually hear it, not to be brave about it,” you say. “I will never be her. I will not sing her songs. I will not die her death. I will not wear her dresses or laugh because she laughed at that part of a joke. I will not stand in the doorway of your worst day and let you call me a second chance.”

He is so still that for a moment you imagine he’s gone. He is not. He is the opposite of gone. He is a man learning very fast how to hold one truth and one hope in the same ribcage without breaking something.

“Okay,” he says, almost inaudible. “Okay. I am too in love with a ghost.” He lifts a hand and stops it at a polite distance from your cheek. The blue flickers—fear, want, respect—then steadies. “I am trying to fall in love with you.”

The world tilts. Not because of the words. Because of the order.

“Trying?” you say, and your voice is not the voice of a saint. It is a girl’s voice. A woman’s. A person with blood and time and a life that does not revolve around other people’s grief. “If that’s what this is, don’t. Don’t try.”

He steps back like you’ve pushed him. “I didn’t— I don’t mean—”

“You mean you want to choose me because I’m close enough,” you say. “Because it would fix something if I fit.”

“No,” he says, quick and desperate. “No, that’s not— God, please— that’s not what I meant.”

“What did you mean.”

“I mean,” he says, and the words roughen with a sudden, furious gentleness, “that I am already falling and I have been trying to do it in a way that doesn’t drown you. I mean I have loved you since you made fun of my elevator pitch for the cafeteria sandwiches because you said the aioli wasn’t real. I mean I am trying to learn how to let it be this and not— not the day the light took you.”

The rain chooses that moment to stop. It’s obscene, the way the sun pokes its finger through the cloud belly and presses a spot of gold on the street. A horn blares. A woman laughs into her phone. The world continues with or without you.

“Then say it,” you whisper, because there are doors that only open if you demand the key. “Say it to me. Here. Now. Because I’m not going to chase a man through a multiverse. I’m going to take a midterm on Thursday and fold my laundry and text my friend pictures of weird dogs I see. If you want me, you can want me in this world or you can go haunt yours and light your candles and I’ll hope you find peace someday. But I won’t be it.”

The flinch is there. And then it isn’t. He straightens like a boy caught slouching who remembers he comes from a home with soft hands and a line in the sand. His eyes are very, very blue.

“Okay,” he says. “Stay there.”

You aren’t going anywhere. He takes one step closer, and then another, careful, a man approaching a wild animal who is not wild at all but simply free. He lifts his hand and holds it palm-up in the six inches between you.

“Y/N,” he says, and his voice breaks once and then steadies. “You. You who hate fireworks but love street fairs. You who drink hot coffee when your throat hurts but iced when you want to think. You who wear pants and don’t sing while you do dishes and have a mug with a fox on it and remember the names of the security guards and talk to your mother on Tuesdays even though she drives you crazy. You who are not a second chance. You who are not a miracle. You who are a person with a life I am lucky enough to have been let into. I love you.”

The city doesn’t pause the way movies do. It stumbles and spills and keeps going. But in the small circle you occupy with him, there is a hush that feels like a dome lowered over your heads. His blue eyes shine like someone turned a light on behind them.

You don’t realize you’ve been braced to run until your shoulders drop and your breath comes easy. You put your fingers in his palm because you have never been a person who takes something carefully offered and throws it back. His hand closes around yours with a care that’s not fear anymore. It’s respect. It’s debt paid in softness.

“Johnny,” you say, and you watch his eyes widen like you’ve said the right password in the right order. “I am not going to be a ghost you get to keep. I am going to be hell to love some days. I am going to change my coffee order because I can. I am going to make you late because I tried on three outfits and then wanted to go home. I am going to tell you if you’re doing too much. I am going to leave if you ask me to be her again.”

“Okay,” he says, like a vow. “Okay.” He swallows. “Can I— may I— can I kiss you?”

“You may,” you say, because the word feels like it belongs in your mouth.

He kisses you like a person who has been practicing what tenderness looks like and has finally been allowed to show his work. He kisses you with both hands cradling your jaw and a restraint that is not fear, not anymore, but reverence. Up close, those blue eyes flutter shut, open, find you again like you’re the horizon. When he pulls back his breath stutters against your cheek and he laughs, shaky and sudden, and something unknots behind your sternum so hard it makes your eyes sting.

“Hi,” he says, ridiculous.

“Hi,” you say back, equally ridiculous.

It isn’t magic. It isn’t a spell that lifts when you put your mouth on someone’s and makes all the old griefs obedient. But something shifts. The shrine in the lab remains a room with a door he can close. The way he looks at you changes. The miraculous panic evaporates and leaves something steadier. He still memorizes you— the way you tuck your foot under your thigh when you read, the way you frown at your laptop like you’re negotiating with it— but the memorization loses its edge of terror. It becomes a pleasure. He learns you the way you learn a route through a city you love.

He tells Sue almost immediately, because of course he does, because he has never been good at keeping his happiness to himself when it is honest. She hugs him hard and then takes his face in both hands and says, “I am happy for you and I am going to worry about you anyway,” and he says, soft, “I know,” and she looks at you over his shoulder and mouths thank you like you’ve done a kindness to a stranger she loves.

Reed shakes his hand solemnly for reasons you don’t pretend to understand and then asks if the coffee preference persists across universes because he’s building a graph. You roll your eyes and he looks delighted that someone has rolled their eyes at him without resentment. Ben brings a cake and says nothing about it when Johnny eats three pieces and then says, around a mouthful of frosting, “I’m happy, big guy,” like he’s explaining why the cake tastes better.

Franklin takes your hand and drags you to see the fort he built in the corner of the living room with sheets and chairs. “You can come in,” he says, serious and benevolent. “No adults allowed.”

“I’m an adult,” you say.

“Not if you’re in a fort,” he says. “The rules.”

You duck under the blanket and Johnny follows, even though he is objectively too big for the space, and you all lie on the floor and look up at the underneath of the sheet, which is dimpled by rubber bands and clothespins and the hook of a houseplant. Johnny’s shoulder presses yours. He doesn’t flinch. Neither do you. His blue eyes peek at you through a triangle of fabric and go soft in the kind of way you don’t recover from; you have to grow around it.

You go home to your apartment one evening after a movie and your phone lights up with a photo you weren’t expecting. It’s the shrine room, but different. The console has been moved. The sticky notes are tucked into a box. The room is still the room, but it isn’t a chapel. It’s a room where something happened and where other things can happen now.

You sit down on your bed and the mattress sighs. Then you text him, because he didn’t send the photo to make you say good boy and he didn’t do it to earn points. He sent it because you asked him to stop asking you to carry it, and he wanted you to see that he heard you.

I’m proud of you, you send.

His reply arrives after a minute. Thank you for not making me do it alone.

You don’t.

You go with him when he visits the room the next time. You stand beside him with your hand in his and say nothing. You don’t need to.

After that, the slope of your days changes almost imperceptibly, the way seasons tip without asking your permission. You stay over; he keeps an extra toothbrush in the cabinet and never tries to throw your hair tie away when he finds it on the nightstand. He starts to text you good morning like he’s been doing it in his head for months and finally got a phone plan. You find yourself reaching for him without thinking when you get to a crosswalk and you don’t stop yourself. He fits your hand like he’s been holding it across timelines.

He doesn’t call you angel. He calls you by your name like it’s his favorite word. The first time he says “Y/N” in his sleep, into the pillow, you feel something old in you turn to face the sun.

The happy ending isn’t fireworks. You still hate those. It’s smaller and better. It’s a Tuesday night in June where the city smells like cut grass and the windows are open and the fan makes the curtains breathe. You’re at his place, the room with the slanted ceiling and the box of records, and he’s on the floor with his back against the couch, legs sprawled, hair going ridiculous in the humidity. You’re on the couch, bare feet pressed to his thigh, and you’re both reading. The lamp turns everything gold. The clock is wrong because Reed took it apart and never put it back together.

Johnny looks up from his book and watches you. Not like a man who is checking on something expensive or breakable. Like a man making sure the joy is real. The blue of his eyes is easy, unguarded—like the sky after a storm when you finally trust it won’t crack again.

“What,” you say, because he’s smiling.

“I was just thinking,” he says.

“Dangerous.”

“Very,” he agrees. He puts the book on his chest and tries words on in his head before letting them out. “I used to think love was a story I owed someone. That it was— I don’t know. A promise you make because the world is unstable and you grab what you can and swear you’ll never let go.”

“And now?”

“And now,” he says slowly, “I think love is being allowed to keep looking. Not for a fixed thing. For a changing person. A person who will wear pants on Tuesday and a skirt on Wednesday and drink hot coffee when her throat hurts and iced when she has to write. A person who will let me be useful and will tell me when I’m making myself into a saint instead of a man. A person who will let me love her without being the answer to questions I should be asking myself.”

“You got all that from a book?” you tease.

He shakes his head. “I got it from you.”

Your chest hurts in a good way. You reach down and touch his cheekbone with your thumb. He leans into it like a cat, blue eyes fluttering shut for a second as if the color itself is grateful.

“Say it again,” you say, because even miracles become real through repetition.

“I love you,” he says. He says it in a tone that makes the lamp flicker like maybe electricity is susceptible to truth.

You don’t just say it back. You say it too. Different word. Same meaning. “I love you.”

The epilogue is a Saturday. There’s a barbecue on the roof of the Baxter Building because Ben insisted and Sue ordered a tent in case it rains and Reed made a grill that can monitor the internal temperature of ribs and the building’s core system at the same time. Franklin is in a kiddie pool with a water gun and a crown of tin foil he made because he’s the King of Summer. The city is behaving like it forgave itself for winter.

You arrive with a bowl of pasta salad you bought because you ran out of time to make it and intend to pass off as yours. Johnny steals a noodle and declares it the best thing he’s ever eaten, which is a lie and the truth both. He has a hand tucked in your back pocket like it grew there. No one comments except Ben, who clasps Johnny’s neck and says, “Look at you,” in a tone that makes you look too.

And there he is. Not the hollow-eyed boy at the edge of a bright room. Not the man praying you won’t disappear if he blinks. He moves through the party like a person inside his skin. He sings along, badly, to whatever song Reed foolishly let Ben put on. He flips a burger and burns it and eats it anyway. He keeps looking at you as if to confirm that you are still here, but the look isn’t desperation. It’s gratitude with its feet up. The blue of his eyes keeps catching the string lights; every time, he looks a little awed, like he can’t believe this is the version of the universe he got.

Sue presses a lemonade into your hand and steps into your space the way sisters do. “He’s different,” she says, eyes on her brother.

“So am I,” you say, and she bumps your shoulder with hers in agreement.

Reed appears and informs you both, delighted, that the ambient rooftop temperature has increased exactly two degrees since Johnny arrived because of thermodynamic anomalies, and you and Sue stare at him until he says, “In other words, he’s happy,” and you both soften and Reed looks very pleased to have translated science into human.

Franklin squirts you with the water gun and then solemnly anoints your knee. “You are part of the team now,” he declares. “Please sign here.”

“Here where?”

He presents a napkin. You sign your name. Johnny watches, then looks away quick, then looks back because he can. When your eyes meet, the blue is bright and playful, not haunted—like a promise that decided to stay.

Later, when the sun slips behind buildings and the fairy lights along the railing blink on, Johnny pulls you into the quiet corner by the herb boxes Sue planted. Basil and mint brush your legs. He puts both hands on your waist like he can’t help it. The city hums. Your life does, too.

“You look like a man who got what he wanted,” you say.

“I look like a man who got what he didn’t know to ask for,” he corrects, gently. “I would’ve asked for a miracle. I got you.”

You put your forehead to his. “Don’t make me your miracle.”

He smiles against your mouth. The blue right there is almost silly, because you’re so close you can see the tiny ring of darker color around each iris. “Never again,” he says. “I learned.”

And you believe him, not because he’s on his best behavior or because the night is soft, but because the next day will be regular and you’ll be there for it and he will too. Because he still flinches sometimes when someone drops a glass and it shatters, and you put your hand on his back and he breathes. Because grief has not exited the building; it just found a seat that isn’t the head of the table. Because he loves you, not as an answer, not as a remedy, but as yourself.

On your way home you pass the coffee cart in the Baxter lobby. He presses his chin to your shoulder while you order and hums in agreement when you choose hot because your throat hurts. He pays in cash because he likes how it feels to tip too much in bills. He carries your cup until you hold out your hand for it, and when he gives it back he doesn’t look relieved that you like it the way she did. He looks pleased that you like it, period.

“Every time,” he says, when you tease him about being a regular.

“Every time,” you echo, and the words don’t mean what they used to. They don’t mean habit as shrine. They mean habit as practice. Something you do on purpose, over and over, because choosing is how love stays.

On the sidewalk he kisses your cheek and then your mouth and then your hand. You let him, because you don’t fade when he touches you. You get brighter. He does too. His blue eyes crinkle when he laughs into your kiss.

Someone snaps a photo. The world will see it tomorrow and say Johnny Storm looks at his girlfriend like she hung the stars. It will be an easy story and a sweet one. The truth is better and smaller. He looks at you like you are a person he loves in a world he almost lost. Like you are not a miracle or a ghost or a second chance, but a first choice he keeps making, in this universe, on this day.

You finish your coffee on the train. You look out the window at your city. You text him a picture of a dog in a sweater with strawberries. He sends back a voice memo of laughter that sounds like a summer kitchen.

It is not the ending he dreamed when the light took you. It is the life he has now, and he lives it like a man who learned— finally, stubbornly— to let love be present tense.

[cafeoa]

╰┈➤

Currently writing something with a Black Widow!reader that takes place in semi continuity (sorta kinda), but since the Red Room was Soviet era program I kept thinking about Black Widow Reader and Pilot Hal Jordan in the Cold War. In Earth-30 Hal (not a GL) gets shot down and tortured by soviets for four years, and it’s been a while but I remember in the Geoff Johns GL run Hal also gets shot down and has a conflict with the Russians, which shakes him, but all this to say that picture Widow!reader in her prime KGB era and USA Air Force pilot Hal Jordan.

Hal's mission — reconnaissance flight over USSR air space — is doomed from the start. Not Hal’s fault it goes south, American intelligence was compromised by Widows seeded into US agencies. Although Hal can outmaneuver a Soviet miG-19 fighter jet and su-9 interceptor, no pilot — not even Hal Jordan — can outfly the iron clad Soviet defenses stretching from Central Asia to the Arctic. It takes a long issue of air missiles to take him down.

He bails out of the U-2, parachute’s into Soviet soil, and has a choice: use the hidden saxitoxin, or live to see what the Soviets decide to do with him. Hal chooses to live out of sheer will to find a way back. He gets captured, yada yada yada USA makes a cover story about a civilian weather plane accident and the politics are very interesting to me but that’s not what you’re here for. A summit for peace talks between East and West looms days away; Hal becomes leverage in the game to force a public confession and fracture Western alliances.

You’re there in interrogations, but it’s to keep an eye on the other agents there on behalf of the Red Room. Undercover. The USSR’s security agencies are quiet slithering rivals with one another, and you are another valuable piece in the game. Soviet leader Khrushchev's power is slipping, the handling of this incident exposing those who believe he has difficulty balancing international interests and the hard faced communists in his party.

Hal treats you with the same shallow charm, and you play the part of the unimpressed, easily distracted woman — stowed away in a room of men eager to underestimate you. One of 28 young Bolshoi ballerinas — that is what you do, isn't it? It's murky. Muddled but yes, a ballerina. And yet —

— at first, he’s exactly the American you were ingrained to despise: Egotistical, self sure, embodying the rot of capitalism. Proof of how the west works to weaken and destroy everything your people built and stood for. But he never breaks. Not under pain, not under hallucinogens. He does not give away his CIA contacts or specifications about the U-2, even when confronted with pictures of the physical wreckage. You will always acknowledge a good soldier — though you suspect it’s stubbornness more than loyalty. Still, you respect it.

When Hal escapes — by his luck or astute planning, you can’t tell — you’re the one called to clean up. You track him not to the US embassy in Moscow, but on his way to the Finnish border.

It's there that you impede him in full mask and gear, and, you don’t know how, but Hal recognizes you. Says your alias. Smiles like he’s been waiting to say it. You’re ready to end this — you’ve got him right there — when you’re intercepted by Soviet GRU soldiers. To preserve your cover, you pull back, dodging under gunfire. And you almost do — you’re a Widow and this is expected — but you’re also trying to not kill any of the GRU men so the KGB can keep its hands clean. Then you’re under a crosshair and as the bullet flies you’re being tackled to the snow. You feel both collisions at once; the bullet, the ground. Hal’s dragging you to cover — even with your advanced awareness that takes a bit longer to process. There’s still a commotion happening, but he shrugs off his stolen coat and uses it to press down on your stomach.

Oh, you’re bleeding. Terrible aim, if anything.

You can heal. The bullet won’t kill you. But Hal doesn’t know that. To him, you're bleeding out in the snow. Hal’s not going for the kill. No, he’s grabbing your hands and placing them on the coat to slow the budding blood. When the GRU closes in, he turns himself in so you can vanish without suspicion.

It’s a stupid move. You echo that thought as you pour alcohol over the wound in the front seat of your getaway vehicle. Stupid idea. An American soldier traded his freedom for nothing but an injury that’s nothing to you, for a woman trained to kill him. But it wasn’t a ploy. It wasn’t a trap. It was sincere. And it sickens you.

Because you would never have done the same.

If the choice was between a life and the mission, you’d choose the mission. Always. You’ve killed without pleasure, but without hesitation. You’d console yourself with the idea you were protecting your country. But what country is worth the faces of the people you’ve orphaned? The people left widows?

When you ask him why, in the dim light of the solitary cell he’s been confined to, Hal says:

“My country's given me lots of things to be grateful for. Freedom. Flight. I try to repay it any way I can, but I will never repay it with the lives of others.”

It’s not an epiphany. Not enough to crack Red Room conditioning, not enough to undo a lifetime of killing. But it plants itself deep. You’ve lived so long in a system that demands you bleed for it, that you forget there are people who won’t kill for theirs. That frightens you more than dying ever has. The headmistress's voice ticks like a clock in the back of your mind at every hour.

And maybe that’s what stays with you — not the politics, not the ideology, but the fact that Hal is the first person to give you a choice. The first to say that as long as you live, it’s not too late to be better. That you don’t have to be another weapon or tool used and discarded by governments waging wars against strangers. That losing your humanity isn't a price anyone should have to pay.

[cafeoa]

𝐂𝐚𝐟é 𝐝𝐞 𝐣𝐞𝐧𝐠𝐢𝐛𝐫𝐞 | 𝐃𝐫𝐚𝐛𝐛𝐥𝐞𝐬

Coast city!reader and Hal Jordan after its destruction

Cold War era USAF Hal Jordan and Black Widow!Reader

[cafeoa]

𝐇𝐨𝐫𝐜𝐡𝐚𝐭𝐚 | 𝐜𝐚𝐟é 𝐞𝐭𝐢𝐪𝐮𝐞𝐭𝐭𝐞

˚　　　　✦　　　.　　. 　 ˚　.　　　　　 . ✦　　　 　˚　　　　 . 　　　.   　　˚　　 　　*　　 　　✦　　　.　　.　　　✦　˚ 　　　　 ˚　.˚　　　　✦　　　.　　. 　 ˚　.　　　　 　　 　　　　 　

☕︎ ☕︎ ☕︎ | Be mindful of the space ˎˊ˗

This is a sfw establishment. There is no explicit sexual content and please do not ask for it. This includes topics such as incest, large age gaps, etc. However, mature themes such as mental health, death, grief, etc. will be talked about and I will add warnings for your use. Anything tagged incorrectly or that you feel should be tagged, let me know. When in doubt, there’s no problem asking.

☕︎ ☕︎ ☕︎ | No custom orders ˎˊ˗

Unfortunately, no requests unless explicitly said so, but you're always encouraged and welcome to send an ask about a concept, a character, or share your thoughts on a post made. Joke around, give what-ifs about an ending, rant about the menu. It's all fun. And, maybe — really depending on inconsistent creativity and motivation — an idea shared might expand into a oneshot or something. Don't submit an ask with that in mind because I don't want to let anyone down, but it's a heads up for a possibility.

Don't be hesitant to interact.

☕︎ ☕︎ ☕︎ | Be respectful to the staff ˎˊ˗

This is a lax environment and we love to have you here, just remember to be kind. Spams, tags, reblogs, and the like are no problem so long as they're not meant to insult literally.

-ˋˏ✄┈┈┈┈ ⛾

Enjoy your drink, smell the coffee. Browse and stay as long as you like!

[cafeoa]

At the beach rn, great and all, but Booster ex-star quarterback Gold would recline in his chair and watch jacked men throw a football around whilst criticizing them to you because that guy there has failed a catch for the fifth time and those throws are terrible. At some point he gets up to join them (show them up) and you just sip a buzz ball and pretend not to know him.

[cafeoa]

── .✦ You're the mutt in the light - an angel in the night

sorry I couldn't save you I tried and I tried but you were like forest fire on forest fire til you snuffed yourself out or, a man is murdered. You've killed him. But Dick knows you, and he just wants to help. Dick Grayson x fem!Reader | pt 1 | next... word count: 3K warnings: none, other than the tone not being very happy ig but for now!!!! notes: finally published this because i have like three other series I want to work on </3

Public attorneys are trademarked as underfunded and overworked, yet yours is in a maroon suit, tailored — you’ve learned how to to tell — a silver Omega watch, and sleek metal frames on the bridge of his nose.

The officer shoos you in. The metal of the chair is frigid, same as the cuffs around your wrists, stark against he overhead light, mellow and dim, like mildew. “My lucky day,” you murmur. You’re leaning on the backrest now, sharp edges digging into your shoulder blades and turning your underside numb. It’s a small holding room, cramped, thick brick walls and steel door separating you from the police officer outside. The lawyers' lips hardly twitch.

He introduces himself with a cordial, “Good afternoon. Henry Becker, your attorney. We have a few things to discuss.” He extends a hand, which you straighten up to return with a firm shake. Mr.Becker slides his leather notebook open and uncaps his fountain pen, tapping the end on the table. "Likely, we're looking at no murder charge, with potential escalation to manslaughter or second-degree murder, depending on the DA's mood."

You tilt your head. "Doesn't sound like you're with the city."

"I'm not." When you continue to stare at him with a challenging smile, he continues. "This is a pro bono situation. I'm volunteering."

"Ah." There's an ache in your neck that you try to rub off. "Flattered. I'd invite you to a drink as thanks, if I could. Could use one myself. Tequila always seems to lighten the mood."

Mr.Becker flips through a stack of photos that he'd tucked into the pages of his notebook. He sets them on the table, facing you. There's the room in the bar — bloody carpet and sheets, the gun, objects strewn about. The body. "I'm three years sober."

You hum. "Congrats."

"The victim is Calvin DeVore. Fifty-eight. No family. He’s had three lawsuits filed against him in the past five years, but scrubbed clean under judicial order.” Mr.Becker’s cataloguing every twitch of expression on your face, every frown or tremor, quickening of breath or furrow of regret. But all he gets is a candid stare. Neither guilt nor pride. Hollow. “Although the witness holds your claim to self defense, the fact that she was a coworker is going to have the prosecutor question her credibility. You'll be charged for that firearm, but they're going to try and spin it even farther: that you had something to hide or had it exactly for this.”

“They?”

Mr.Becker adjusts his glasses. “DeVore was no kingpin himself, but he had strong backings. The kind that found him useful and aren't likely to forgive the death of one of their own.”

There’s still blood under your nails. Dried and clumpy. You pick at it.

“Everything you say to me is under strict confidentiality, so, please, if there’s anything you didn’t divulge to the police—” he gestures for you to carry on.

There's a tick tick tick from Mr.Becker's watch. It fills in the seconds of silence it takes you to speak as you rub your fingers on your clothes. “Thank you,” you say, finally, folding your hands on the table and looking him right in the black of his eye. “But I’m afraid this isn’t that exciting of a case. It’s cut and dry. My counsel to you? In the most grateful way possible, go be charitable to someone else, someone who actually needs it.”

Pandora's Bar remains destitute in the aftermath. Yellow police tape, graffiti already building up on the brick exterior — it congeals like thick mucus. Dick slips in through the backdoor you'd walk in and out of each night he stopped by. It's an intrusion, almost, to step in.

The ground floor remains untouched and much the same. Chairs still in place, if not shoved far back. Alcohol behind the bar. Glasses littered on tables and the counter, some still lingering with undrinked liquor as if the people had been erased mid dance, mid drink. It's a snapshot in time. Dick pictures what your nights must have been like here. There, seated at the counter, crossing your legs and leaning towards a man that you pretended to remember the name of, giggling when words died down. Dick's only ever seen the aftermath. You rubbing your skin, like it's cotton and it's tar both at once; how you rock away from him then throw yourself to hold any part of his body when you catch it. Dick swipes a finger over a table with ring-shaped marks. Thinks, you were here once, too.

He makes his way up the stairs to the room. It's been sectioned off, some forensics equipment still littered. When he enters, he stops by the doorway; scans the layout. He takes it in and places three people within it like he's a spectator.

The blood on the sheets is black and scraping by now, flaking like old paint. Dick gets closer, fixes DeVore in the position he was in before the moment of death — how he'd have to bend over and kneel to match the splatter. Doubled over, as if in pain. Only injuries besides scratch marks on his hands were the bruises on his side. Blotched and ugly, with a heavy object. The room itself is sparse in decor, meant more for quick visits rather than permanent stays. No personal items like books or statues or picture frames. It's what draws him to the table lamp on the nightstand beside the bed, heavy and with a grainy base, like cement. Wide enough to be picked up with one hand.

Dick gets closer, looms over it and twists around to get a full sweep. From his gantlet, he uncaps a small spray of luminol, douses the object in it. The reaction makes a spot on the base glow faint in the dark from traces of blood, and Dick takes a step back, captures the image with the lenses in his mask.

When he takes everything and himself back to his cluttered apartment, Barbara calls him. He's kept up with her. Responded to her check in's, liked the funny posts she sent, but this is Oracle, has eyes and ears in places even Batman can't pry open. So Dick isn't surprised when she starts the conversation with "What did you do?", just miffed.

"I've grown out of my rebellious phase, you know." Dick toggles his cell phone on speaker and sets it on the kitchen island as he leans on the counter with his forearms. "I'm mature now, believe it or not. Build my own blanket fort and everything."

"It'd be structurally unsound, if you did. Now, fess up. Why did Bruce hire a criminal defense attorney from Muller&Neumann? That's not who he has on retainer."

Dick stares ahead at the cream walls by the cabinets. Blinking, running over the texture and empty space that permeates the entire apartment, like he's still in the state of moving in. "It's Bruce. Who am I to understand the mind of the Bat?"

"Who better?" Barbara corrects.

"Is there any competition? Alfred changed his diapers and saw him through every middle school heartbreak."

"Well, maybe Alfred knows why this attorney, who Bruce hired, is representing someone I've never heard of for homicide.”

"What, Bruce can't do good acts outside of the cowl now?" There's no orange juice or milk in his fridge, too busy to grocery shop the entire week. He could order a pizza, read over anything your attorney wrote up — a peek, he tells himself.

"In Bludhaven?"

"Huh, is it?"

"Really? You want to play this game when I have the documents opened up in front of me right now? Okay. Why don't you tell me why you were at Pandora's Bar. Same place the defense worked at and where the homicide took place."

Dick slows down, no fire-away reply. He's still learning how to not dig into wounds when he's riled up. Barbara doesn't deserve that. Not when the consequences are his to make right and his to stuff down. "Well—”

"Shut up for a sec. I'm not finished. Looks like it was also a frequent stop for you on patrols. Twice a week, minimum. What, you're gonna tell me they had a really good live band?"

Seems Bab's took her time to be thorough, from trailing back his suits GPS. Still, Dick shrugs. Says, "Couldn't tell you. Wasn't really my vibe."

"Do you enjoy being insufferable?"

"You used to find it endearing."

"When it's not aimed at me," Bab's mutters. Her breath buzzes through the speaker, a slow, drawn inhale more for him to take in instead of her. When she speaks again, it is consoling, hushed. "Dick, I'm not here to call you out on mistakes. If you put aside your lone wolf attitude to ask Bruce for a favor, then this is important. I want to help you. You can play hooky all you want, but think, what's the logical thing to do in this situation?"

Dick’s grateful for that. He’s always preferred cold hard facts over sentiment. He relents with a looseness in his bones, like he's unfurling. “Got a grasp on what's going on?"

"More or less." Typing from her end. "Your friend's going to be charged with murder, or pending manslaughter. But say she gets acquitted of those at trial, then she's still being faced with a felony gun charge with one to four years sentence. I'm ruling out probation based off how chummy the DA and DeVore were getting the past few months."

"The guns not her’s."

"You sure?" Bab's asks. There's no sarcasm in her tone; nothing but a tether seeking an honest evaluation.

"Positive."

Bab's continues without a pause. "Then it might have been DeVore's. I'll get you a list of sellers to check out and investigate. But, I read the case file. This raises another question."

His fingers clench into a fist that taps against the marble counter. "I know."

"What are you planning, Dick?"

A full day does not pass before Dick reaches out. They stuffed you into a solitary county jail cell until bail is considered and trial prep starts, and you're there, laying down on a slab of bunk bed, one leg bent as you stretch out. Dick sees you from the shadows and all those conversations shared between you two rush back. He expects to find you changed, with a drain of color robbed from killing a man or thrown behind bars. Yet you're much the same, still that person from the bar, turning in bed like you'll have to get up tomorrow and go to work at sunset.

"They get cable here?" he speaks out, a low spike at the end. Casual.

You still, blinking in succession before the intonation of his voice and the airs of it flicker a knowing behind your eyes. "Oh, plenty. Look, my favorite show is on." And you point to the block of wall in front of you, nothing but cement and gray cracks. "Riveting. Visiting hours are over, by the way." You don't look for him, knowing you won't find him and he's unwilling to be found. The lines drawn remain uncrossed, stiff and rigid.

"I've never been one for following the rules."

"Careful now, you'll get me all excited."

There's much to say that Dick can't pick a word to start with. There's a camera in the corner, the red light off. Three minutes, Barbara had said.

When the seconds start speeding up, he asks, "How you holding up?"

You snort. "Same as the last time you asked. Guards could try getting the stick out their ass, though."

There's so much there that's like a mirror to Dick, his own reflection that he knows is present but skips over. "I'm working on something, but I need your help. There's not much time. The gun, who's was it?"

Not a stutter, not a doubt. "Mine," you answer.

Dick wasn't expecting an immediate solution to his plans, but he had hoped, and this douses all that. Try again, he tells himself. Another approach. "Here I thought trying to keep you out of jail made us friends," he strains.

"Aw, all soft and worried about me?"

"You're not? DeVore's team is going to do everything they can to send you to prison, and that unregistered gun dices all possibilities of you walking free, witness or not."

He's to the left outside your cell, you figure. If you were to sit up and lean over, you'd catch a peek of his side, but you don't move. "Most of us have bought a gun or two under the table. Kinda have to, here."

"Why do you insist on doing this?" Dick whispers. You can hear the clenching of his teeth and imagine the knot in his expression. "You're not cooperating with your attorney. If you go to prison, DeVore's people are going to find a way to get to you. You'll be dead within the month."

"If I tell you to let this go, will you?"

"No."

"Why? Because you feel like it's your fault I'm in here?" The night's getting hot and late, that hour when the truth seems to slip past veiled words easier, either from fatigue or surrender. You trace the bandages around your neck. "It's not. We all have choices. I'm real good at picking the bad ones, but this one's different. It's good and it's mine."

"Because it's not right." Dick's voice picks up the end, and he has to quiet himself back down. "This isn't justice. You deserve to live your life. Let me help you. I can make sure you two stay safe, you and Ginger."

For the first time, your face changes, it loses its painted vividness and settles into a thin regret. "I knew were my life was going, Wing. Same way it has been for years. I wake up, I do it again, and again. Just try to get through. Then again the next." The apartment you're renting is nothing but a white room with a mess scattered about, a place that when you return you can't bear to lay on the bed sheets. Now rents due next week and you’re not going to be able to pay it — but it doesn’t matter anymore, does it? "Every time I showered I felt dirtier than before. At some point, I kept thinking that's what suited me best, what I deserved, to live with the filth." You're playing with your fingers, rubbing the curve of your joints and drawing patterns over and over. Then, slipping out of you, near an unexpected confession, "I haven't prayed in a long, long time."

Dick lets the weight of your words sink in the air. He gives them weight. "Would you like to?"

You can only follow his voice in the dark, but you know he catches it; the disjointed smile and weak shrug that tumbles out along with a raspy laugh. "Nah. I don't have it in me."

"You sure picked a good city, Wing. What, you a sucker for lost causes?" You had asked him once, back in some spring, snacking on a pack of sunflower seeds you had swiped from one of the girls at the bar. Dick had been sporting an ache on his back from a fight, and you seemed to tell.

He hadn't liked how you were able to notice him in ways he tried to conceal. Not because you’re observant, but rather, a magician recognizes their own tricks. He needed to refine his lies, wipe the dust out of his manners of avoidance. But the two of you are so alike in that regard, withdrawing into oneself in the face of your own discomfort — maybe it's why so many things are left unspoken.

"Like I haven't been asked that question a thousand times," Dick had said, standing up straighter and firming his back as if to shrug off the assured glance you sent his way. "The city's so sick its drowning itself. But that's even more reason, isn't it? To make even a dent in this place would be worth more than where I'm not needed."

You looked at the opening in the alleyway then, the drums and guitar from inside the bar taking up the space of quiet, watching cars and streetlights flicker in the downtrodden midnight. When you spoke, it was slow and more honest in its invocation than anything you had said all week. Like it was someone else speaking. "For it is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick."

"Flattering comparison, but no, I'm not that good."

"Oh, I'm aware. I'd reckon part of you likes it, Wing. Even when you're on the ledge between death and escape."

"Maybe. What about you?"

You'd thought about it, and smiled. "I think I'm too stuck to let go."

Here, now; Dick can't move. Barbara's in his ear, recounting a time, telling him to hurry. He can't move.

Then, "I'm going to talk to Ginger."

That makes you shift, curling up into the wall while hugging the pillow to your chest. "Leave the poor girl alone. She's had enough of all this to write a memoir."

But Dick's looking at his escape route, wrapping one hand around the bars separating you two as if that will transfer his sincerity and substitute for his presence. And he's rushing out words to buy you more time, not him. "I'll talk to her, get this sorted out. You're going to get out of here, okay? Trust me. Then, after, we can grab a cappuccino, visit St. Bernadine's if you want."

Well, you don't say anything back, but you shut your eyes.

[cafeoa]

⛾ ᴄᴀꜰᴇ ᴏᴀ | ᴇꜱᴛ 1959 | ᴡʀɪᴛɪɴɢ ᴡʜᴀᴛ ɪ ꜰᴇᴇʟ ʟɪᴋᴇ ꜰᴏʀ ᴅᴄ ᴄᴏᴍɪᴄꜱ.

-ˋˏ✄┈┈┈┈ Macrina ! 20+, she/her | Hal Jordan and Kilowag approved. NOT officially licensed by the Guardians. Report us and Ganthet WILL shut us down. Separate branch in Keystone City. Endorsed by all three Flashes.

MENU | ☕︎ ☕︎ ☕︎

Café de jengibre | Dick Grayson’s pick

.ᐟ Drabbles

Café con leche | Barry Allen’s pick

.ᐟ Series

Café de olla | Hal Jordan’s pick

.ᐟ One Shots

Cafecito | Wally West’s pick

.ᐟ Asks

Horchata | Booster Gold’s pick

.ᐟ Café etiquette

[cafeoa]

If you see me editing my theme back and forth like crazy no you didn’t

[cafeoa]

. ݁ ˖ ♯ 𐔌 𝘣𝘰𝘺𝘧𝘳𝘪𝘦𝘯𝘥 𝘵𝘦𝘹𝘵𝘴 𐦯 DC SMAU .ᐟ ´-゛

ᵎᵎ 𝒇𝒆𝒂𝒕𝒖𝒓𝒊𝒏𝒈 : 𝒘. 𝒘𝒆𝒔𝒕 v.2 ⟢ ゛. ⸝⸝. ⋆ !! ✉️ ྀི— REQUEST

𝜗𝜚 𝒏𝒐𝒕𝒆𝒔 : 𝘤𝘰𝘯𝘵𝘢𝘪𝘯𝘴 𝘥𝘦𝘴𝘤𝘳𝘪𝘱𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯𝘴 𝘰𝘧 𝘧𝘦𝘮!𝘳𝘦𝘢𝘥𝘦𝘳 𝘣𝘶𝘵 𝘧𝘦𝘦𝘭 𝘧𝘳𝘦𝘦 𝘵𝘰 𝘪𝘯𝘵𝘦𝘳𝘱𝘳𝘦𝘵 𝘪𝘵 𝘵𝘰 𝘺𝘰𝘶𝘳 𝘭𝘪𝘬𝘪𝘯𝘨. 𝘮𝘦𝘯𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯𝘴 𝘰𝘧 𝘧𝘰𝘶𝘭 𝘭𝘢𝘯𝘨𝘶𝘢𝘨𝘦. 𝘪𝘯𝘤𝘭𝘶𝘥𝘦𝘴 𝘴𝘶𝘨𝘨𝘦𝘴𝘵𝘪𝘷𝘦 𝘤𝘰𝘮𝘮𝘦𝘯𝘵𝘴.

𓂃 . 𝒎𝒖𝒔𝒊𝒏𝒈𝒔 , idk actually :3

TYSM FOR THE REQUEST YAYAY, wally is like my fav guy ever he’s so cutieee i need more of him that isn’t him getting fuh over by the writers, recently he’s been on a generational trauma run. who let spider-man writers get a hold of flash get out.

anywaysss yippee i really don’t know what else to add here. . .

also peek the newspaper page? took longer than i thought but it was so fun to make!

⎯ׅ⎯⎯⎯⎯۪⎯⎯⎯ׅ⎯⎯ׂ⎯⎯ׅ⎯⎯⎯⎯ׅ⎯⎯⎯⎯ׅ⎯ׂ⎯⎯ׅ⎯⎯

© mylovingkiss. 2025 | feel free to request! but please don’t steal, translate, or modify any of my works! thank you ༝༚༝༚

[cafeoa]

café con leche? o café con queso? pienso…

Vodka

No pero en realidad nunca eh tenido café con queso y ahora tengo curiosidad

Normalmente me echo mi café con leche y un pan dulce en las mañanas, pero no sé qué me ha pasado…me ha empezado a gustar café negro sin azúcar…

me estoy haciendo vieja…

[cafeoa]

⋮ ⌗ ┆ꜱᴜᴘᴇʀᴄᴜᴛꜱ

Maybe you shouldn't Impulsively chop your bangs. Should have learned that lesson by now. Oh well. You'll do it again. Wally West x reader word count: 1K notes: totally not based off recent events

Hair's gonna clog the sink. You're hunched over, dripping in dim amber lighting, staring into the mirror with a grimace, running your fingers through the chopped strands and tugging them down down down but they barely graze the tip of your eyebrows, the metal of the tiny three inch scissors you found buried under old hair ties jabbing a violet ache into the side of your middle finger. The AC is whirring in the sticky popsicle heat of summer.

"Babe," you call, head peeking out into the hallway. The television is on, statically playing a John Cena movie you abandoned half an hour ago, chips and half drunk lemonade on the coffee table. Wally's in front of you next time you blink, light breeze ruffling your pajamas. "Does it look stupid?"

He crosses his arms in that sleeveless shirt you bought him yesterday, tilting his head without a word. He opens him mouth, and you see it. His mind, looking you over five hundred times in one second and thinking just what are you talking about. He's never been a detective. You're attempting for the life of you to appear annoyed and nonchalant, frowning, narrow-eyed, but Wally's smiling — eyebrows scrunched up in that way when he's not buying it. And you can't help it. You crack: mouth corners twitching till silent laughter shakes your shoulders and you break eye contact in defeat.

You give it to him in the end: "My bangs." Wally's eyes flicker up, pause, and then widen. Now you're near pouting. "That bad?"

He backtracks. "What? No, I didn't even say anything."

"You're no actor, Wallace," you say, low and straight.

Wally knows there's no real bite to it and pulls you in by the waist, rough fingers skimming the fabric of your top. Ghostly. Your hardly feel it on your skin. "It's cute," he admits, green irises alight in amusement. "In a punk kinda way. Can punk be cute?"

"The moment you find yourself constricted and within guidelines it is no longer punk," you drone into his shirt, the cotton soft on your forehead as you squeeze his sides. Then, "You think I'm ugly and you're going to break up with me."

It evicts a short laugh out of him. Wally's trailing his palms up your arms to grip your shoulders, red locks straying down from his half-hearted styling. "Babe, you've seen me cry to A Goofy Movie. You're not getting rid of me."

From your peripheral, you catch your reflection. Your head turns; side to other side. '"I look like Lydia Deetz."

Wally meets your glare through the mirror. "From Beetlejuice?" He turns your body to face the sink fully, making note of the cut hair there — another blink and it's balled in a paper towel in the trashcan — the side of his jaw pressing on the warmth of your cheek. "We still have to see the sequel. I think I still have Dick's Netflix password."

"He hasn't changed it after you flooded his library with power rangers?" The soles of your bare feet shift, stuck between the silly Flash rug you bought as a joke last Christmas and the frigid beige tile flooring. Either by design or coincidence, Wally's white nike socks are covering his cowled face on the rug.

"He probably watched all of them."

"I'll just pirate it." You nudge Wally with your head, gently, turning to him; hip touching the stained granite vanity. "Now, me. I am in severe distress."

Wally hums, hands on you once again: nails tapping your wrist. "Sounds like a job for The Flash."

"Does The Flash happen to have a cosmetology license?"

"I don't think you need it." Wally's fingering through your bangs, holding strands between his thumb and pointer finger; comparing them to one another. Uneven as hell, you guess. Like you sneezed when making the final trim. "Like I said, It's cute. It makes you seem like one of those fashion influencers. Trendy. In an unconventional way."

"This is Kansas," you remind him. "Not Metrpolis."

Wally lets go. "Hey, if you really want to, give me like, five minutes and I'll read through every cosmetology book in the library. I'll even be able to give you a mullet."

"I think that's more your style." You tousle and try to make a birds nest out of Wally's hair, but it's all soft and just gives him that fresh-out-of-bed look. Wally lets you, bowing his head for you to reach. "Just messing with you, I kinda like it. Is it weird?"

"A little odd. But so are you," Wally muses.

You snicker. "Perfect, then."

With his thumb, Wally wipes a small clipped hair stuck to the inner corner of your eye. The televisions faded in the other room by now. It's hot and you should check the thermostat because Wally's surely gotten his grubby hands on it when he came in, same as now, when he herds you flat on the vanity with fingers clutching the scissors you pushed to the corner of the counter with a "Yes, you are."

"Alright, hotshot. Flattery works, so keep it up." You sit on the granite top and wrap your fingers on the edge to keep yourself steady without tumbling into the sink, ends digging into the back of your thighs. Soap bottles and face washes and the toothbrush holder pokes your knuckles. Wally's profile shines beside you in the reflection of the mirrored medicine cabinet. He closes one eye, steps back, slides out the edge of the scissors blades to measure. His tongue’s sticking out. Then he's cradling your face, nestling your jaw in place as he goes to cut.

"Just gonna even them out," is what Wally says, under the snip snip snip. The ugly yellow paint of the walls slopes over his shoulders. Yellow flecks scattered in his eyes, much prettier, sunbeams through tree canopies — his breath tickles your nose. Hair flutters down over your eyes and lands on your lap. You think, I'll have to sweep later. The AC has stuttered off, the room is hot, and it floods you with softness and loose limbs like silk threads. Oh, him. Him.

Next you're tapping his shin with your toes, saying, "I shouldn't have done it. It will happen again."

To which he laughs, kisses your hair, says, “Perfect.”

[cafeoa]

. ݁ ˖ ♯ 𐔌 𝘣𝘰𝘺𝘧𝘳𝘪𝘦𝘯𝘥 𝘵𝘦𝘹𝘵𝘴 𐦯 DC SMAU .ᐟ ´-゛

ᵎᵎ 𝒇𝒆𝒂𝒕𝒖𝒓𝒊𝒏𝒈 : 𝒘. 𝒘𝒆𝒔𝒕 ⟢ ゛. ⸝⸝. ⋆ !! ✉️ ྀི— ORIGINAL

𝜗𝜚 𝒏𝒐𝒕𝒆𝒔 : 𝘤𝘰𝘯𝘵𝘢𝘪𝘯𝘴 𝘥𝘦𝘴𝘤𝘳𝘪𝘱𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯𝘴 𝘰𝘧 𝘧𝘦𝘮!𝘳𝘦𝘢𝘥𝘦𝘳 𝘣𝘶𝘵 𝘧𝘦𝘦𝘭 𝘧𝘳𝘦𝘦 𝘵𝘰 𝘪𝘯𝘵𝘦𝘳𝘱𝘳𝘦𝘵 𝘪𝘵 𝘵𝘰 𝘺𝘰𝘶𝘳 𝘭𝘪𝘬𝘪𝘯𝘨. 𝘮𝘦𝘯𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯𝘴 𝘰𝘧 𝘧𝘰𝘶𝘭 𝘭𝘢𝘯𝘨𝘶𝘢𝘨𝘦. 𝘪𝘯𝘤𝘭𝘶𝘥𝘦𝘴 𝘴𝘶𝘨𝘨𝘦𝘴𝘵𝘪𝘷𝘦 𝘤𝘰𝘮𝘮𝘦𝘯𝘵𝘴.

𓂃 . 𝒎𝒖𝒔𝒊𝒏𝒈𝒔 : inspired by this beautiful writer’s smau for wasabi east @suigenerisisadiva (ily ily ily)

i need to come clean abt everything. that anonymous request for your wally smau was actually me heheheh ૮꒰ྀི › ̫ ‹ ꒱ྀིა but i honestly love text fics sm i’m sorry i can’t stop eating them up.

I SWEAR I’M ALMOST DONE W MY DANTE DRAFTS ARGHHH (W excuse) but editing fanfics is so ughhh. i’m picky so it doesn’t help at all.

anyways hope you enjoy :3 someone pretty please request more smau ideas omggg. . .

⎯ׅ⎯⎯⎯⎯۪⎯⎯⎯ׅ⎯⎯ׂ⎯⎯ׅ⎯⎯⎯⎯ׅ⎯⎯⎯⎯ׅ⎯ׂ⎯⎯ׅ⎯⎯

© mylovingkiss. 2025 | feel free to request! but please don’t steal, translate, or modify any of my works! thank you ༝༚༝༚

[cafeoa]

Hmmm the sick concept of Hal Jordan and a reader who grew up in coast city, not particularly close to him, but you went to the same schools for most of your lives — the teasing of Hal as an outcast in the background before morning announcements. It was pure luck that you were out of town when your home became a crater in the earth. Small roadtrip driven by an existential crisis with the date picked out by closing your eyes and landing your finger on a random day on the calendar. You’d call it divine protection but that wouldn’t be fair. After all, why you? Why cowardly, selfish little you? It wasn’t you who deserved to live.

Then there’s Hal’s grief and fall from grace during and after the whole Parallax ordeal and, yeah— you two kind of just find each other one day. Fate’s design. You were haunting the reconstructed streets of downtown, Hal patrolling from above, and you stood out because it was still a ghost town with people too hesitant to move back yet. You don’t believe in fate. The two of you talk, casual at first. Catch up on what new job you’re taking up this time and how long you’ll last, Hal’s streak as Ferris Air’s worst yet best employee, and then you’re reminiscing. Jennifer, Hal’s first love. His sweetheart. You tell him how you’d catch glimpses of him walking her to class, before they were anything romantic, the two laughing, an airs of kiddie romance still blooming and permeating the air to the point you could catch it from the other end of the hall. You saw it all for brief moments: from friends to lovers to strangers again. Hal asks you what Jennifer was up to, now. Before. You were never friends, but word on the grapevine was she was engaged, bought a picture perfect suburban home still here in Coast City and was thinking about getting her masters in chemistry. The kid who Hal got into a fist fight once way back in middle school ended up opening his own restaurant downtown after starting out in a food truck for two years — Mexican or some fusion you can’t remember. Then there’s the diner near your old high school that kids would flock to in the afternoon, buzzing with rowdy teens and the frolicking waitress with a lazy eye that’s been working there longer than you’ve been alive. They had the best strawberry milkshakes in the country, you’d bet. Hal agrees but the tragedy is you’re the only two people left in the world who can testify to that (not really but it feels like it).

And this is how Hal and you get along; licking each other’s wounds, sitting in the same shame and guilt. There’s so many ways this can go. Turns out Hal knew your best friend and then you’re sucking out all the information from him, asking him to retell each moment and each conversation and if she was more sarcastic or forward or if her hair at graduation was in a ponytail or down. There are sweet moments. Secret spots where only people who lived here remember, Cali pizza night with an action comedy film, you calling him out when his ego’s getting to him again.

I don’t know if Hal’s nature would let him be codependent with you even during this, because he wouldn’t stick around for long periods of time, but I do think it would lead him back to you. Sometimes it’s his tendency to self punish and wallow in guilt by saying the wrong thing and being a jerk then leaving (because even after the Specter he’s never felt redeemed). He’ll be out in space, on some alien planet in a galaxy in the cold side of the universe so far from home, but there will always be a tug, a tether that reminds him to go back, eventually. A trauma bond, if you will. Hal’s commitment issues hit you in the gut but you bear through it even when you’re left alone blasting music in bed so your head doesn’t have enough room to think because hey — him and you have the same loss shaped hole in your hearts. He’s the only one who can understand, you think. And the pain’s good, you like it. You deserve it. By putting up with this pain then you somehow thinks it justifies you living, as if it’s your permission to let the day continue on because no it wouldn’t be right to be without it — not when your mother and your father and your brother were wiped away in an instant.

Part of it is that the two of you keep one another in the same cycle of grief and trauma. You, because moving on feels like forgetting all those people and memories that matter. Hal sees the renewed coast city and wants to keep going, but he’s still here, because he failed everyone — failed you, and he hurt people, even if it wasn’t really him. It was his body. His will. And he can’t leave you, not when you’re so similar and abandoning you would be like destroying the last remnant of the past. It’s idolization, like if him and you make something out of this then Coast City’s not dead. You’re each other’s comfort and reminder.

[cafeoa]

── .✦ You're the mutt in the light - an angel in the night

sorry I couldn't save you I tried and I tried but you were like forest fire on forest fire til you snuffed yourself out or, a man is murdered. You've killed him. But Dick knows you, and he just wants to help. Dick Grayson x fem!Reader | next... word count: 2.2K warnings: implied sexual work (nothing explicit), one use of the word whore notes: I'm working on a part 2 & 3 to this, but pt 3 is a fuse bc i'm stuck between two different endings. Yummm to let characters be happy or be consumed by themselves.

"Hey," he says, but it already sounds like goodbye.

You're smiling, lips curving and moving to clutch on to his hand as if not holding it will set the sidewalk on fire. Dark and listless eyes with smudged eyeliner on your waterline, they don't smile back, and you greet him with alcohol in your breath, a taste you're certainly conscious of but exhale in full regard, as if calling him and telling him to stay far away all the same. "Hey yourself, handsome. Missed me already?" The quick blinking, the concealer under the eyes, the tightness in your expression. There's no touching of skin from underneath his suit, but it's a ghost of a grip. You're hardly there.

"I thought I was more subtle than that," Dick plays along.

"If subtlety is your game, then you're losing, Nightwing. I like my men forward and desperate." It's a lonely alleyway, deep in Bludhaven's streets, the flickering light of the lamppost hitting the corner of your face. Early November where it's still not cold enough to see your breath. Both of you let the lie settle like a bad comedy film.

Dick's fingers twitch to hover over your eyelids, shield them from the grazing light for a lapse of rest and faux sleep. You'd pull away, he knows, and he can think about reaching out but never will. So he laughs, instead. "Good thing I’ve already booked the florists. I’ll have a field of daffodils on your porch by morning."

And you spew more lies that you both pretend are real with the prettiest smile. "My favorite." Roses or lilies or sunflowers you'd tell him, but that's too much, a grain of sand, really — the forcing of a gap that's yours too smother and mute. When you curl your arms around his bicep, letting your head rest against his arm, you do it because you don't want to. He should be stepping back or pulling away but he doesn't and you're unsure what to make of it. If you're that inconsequential or if he's turned you inside out already. "Who you stalking this time?" you ask, nothing more to say.

"Anyone by the surname DeVore, been around lately?"

You drum your nails against him, fuzzy memories molding together. "Believe so. Last night, maybe." You’re glancing at him, at the white of his mask and imagining what color eyes are behind it. For fun, not interest. "Someone important?"

"No," Dick says. "Someone he knows."

"He met some blonde guy in a checkered tie,” you start, in that tone that’s all play. “Stripes too. Like a mime got into politics. Hey, Wing — promise me you’ll never dress like that. Pretty boys like you shouldn’t waste the potential."

Dick huffs, mouth corners lifting. "I'm pretty good at keeping up with trends."

"You sound like an old man."

"Listen," Dick interjects, caution underneath how he keeps his voice steady. "He comes by again, can you talk to him for me? Nothing dangerous. He just talks. Too much, hopefully." Then, adds, emphasizes. "Only if you're up for it."

He's like a little devil whispering in your ear. You want to get as far away from him as you can. You want to give him everything he wants. "Must be bad if you're dragging me into this," you murmur, you don't know why.

"Wouldn't be the first time," Dick says.

"This is more than me slipping you some gossip here and there."

"Yeah, I know. Sorry, I won't ask again."

Dick says it with a finality that twists your insides up with uncertainty. He means it, you think. You hope. "I'll do it. What do you need?"

"You can think about it, you know." He's seeing you again — that way that makes you want to wrap your arms around him and sink your face into his chest so he has nothing to read while something to keep his hands busy in the way you're used to with men.

Instead, you say, "Nah. I’ve never been good at saying no to a pretty face. Keeps things simple, doesn't it?" Then you're letting him go, turning away to smooth down your hair and scrape off clumped cigarette ash from your heels. You're not facing him as you talk, busying yourself with fixing the clothes that stick to your skin. "Come back tomorrow just before closing. The guy was talking to Ginger. Took a real liking to her 'cause it showed she's new. Young, too. Bet you he'll be back."

With a sincerity that reels itself into your lungs, Dick says, "Thank you. Really."

And you turn your back on him because of it, palm on the handle of the kitchen door of the bar. The alley is sweltering hot, now. Every passing car and siren not loud enough to drown out the bubble you're in. "Better be important. From what Ginger told me, he's not exactly the funny type, but we gotta laugh anyway."

"Hey, wait." Dick's hand shoots out to grab your wrist, but he stops, clenches his fingers around empty air and lets his arm fall. "What about you? How are you doing?"

You laugh. You make the corner of your eyes crinkle intentionally, like that'll throw him off; as if he’s not one of the world's best detective's, mentored by Gotham's Dark Knight. "Same as the last time you asked."

"Working all night again?"

You raise a brow. Then you're teasing him, playful, full of energy in the way he knows is just to get him off your back. "If I was?"

"Then I'd ask how much do you need to take the rest of the night off." But he knows he could pay you off tonight, and you'd be right back the next. No amount of money would fix the way you think this is it for you. Still, he tries. He'll keep trying. Because that's the point, isn't it?

"Tempting," you say, almost sing-song. "But, I'll pass. I'm done at one, but I'm keeping an eye on Ginger. She's still getting the hang of things, still learning how get guys drunk enough they forget she exists."

"You're a good friend."

You don't understand why that makes you feel like a bastard. "Not friends. She's...new. To this. Still fidgety."

Here, late at night, Dick sees it. A downturn of your eye. A simpering smile, into a frown. "If you need anything—"

The smile is back on your face. When Dick really looks, he can picture the little girl fighting it out in there. "Yeah, yeah. If I need someone punched, I’ll shine a flashlight in the sky. Later, Wing."

Next time Dick sees you, you're caked in blood at the back of a police car. The red and blue lights cleave through the washed out brick sides of the building, swallowing up the pavement. A crowd's outside the bar, sealed off by yellow barricade tape. Officers talk to patrons and guests, getting statements, holding back the curious neighbors and passerby's who crowd around with nothing more to do on a Wednesday night. Paramedics are hauling a stretcher with a white sheet over a body into the ambulance, one pitstop before the morgue.

"Detective, a run down?" Dicks raking the scene with his eyes, watching the forensics department enter the building, watching the witnesses, making note of every twitch on their faces, which ones seem calm or frazzled or on the brink of running. There's a redhead sobbing on another ambulance, blanket over her shoulders.

"Solved case, Nightwing. Scram outta 'ere," Detective Swan drawls, popping a tablet of Nicotine gum in his mouth.

Dick forces on a grin. "Never seen you so excited to have me here," he says. You're in the cop car, staring straight ahead. There's blood on your collar. On your cheek. Dick can't tell how much is yours. "You sound confident."

"Murder weapon on suspect. Matchin' prints. Suspect not denying." Detective Swan pops another tablet. His fingers tap against the gum case in the pocket of his faded coat, itching and prying it open then closing it again. "Most dammin' of all, witness saw the whole thing."

"Did it come with a nice bow and greeting card?" Dick's eyes are stuck on you in the cop car. You just keeping looking ahead. Don't even care about the knot in your hair. "Sounds almost comical."

Detective Swan shoots Dick a glance from the corner of his eye, rolling his stiff neck with a drawl. "That's what I was thinkin'. Too good to be true."

"What do you have so far? Conspiracy? Have you picked up on anyone who might have reason to frame the suspect?" Dick's crossing his arms and looking back at the bawling redhead. "What did looking into the main witness get you?"

And all Detective Swan does is chew his gum, tap his foot, and exhale. The red of the sirens drowns his face in shadow. "It's a closed case, Nightwing."

Now Dick is stepping in front of him, staring him down with his eyebrows furrowed tight enough for it to read over his mask. "You're going to ignore this? That's not justice, Detective."

"And this is Bludhaven," Detective Swan replies. "That word don't always apply 'ere."

"An innocent person will end up punished."

"She didn't deny anything. Bad way to look innocent."

"Then we have to figure out why."

"And if she didn't do it?” Detective Swan opens his gum case. “Worst thing that happens is a dead crony and a jailed whore."

Dick's jaw sets.

Detective Swan meets his eyes then, from behind the mask. Tired, slouched, red in the whites. "Not everythin' gotta be fixed. Sometimes, best thing for everyone is to just let it die."

Bludhaven PD thinks its information is safe only because Dick finds it more convenient to convince them of it than have them change things up each time he needs to steal data. He's reading over your case on his handheld the minute its logged and filed, mouthing the typed words under his breath, the blue of his screen making him squint. Each detail is placed in his head like a house of stone.

A gunshot went off in the bar. Police called. DeVore shot dead in a private room, bullets match the gun with your prints on it. A gun you were caught holding. Unregistered. No fight back from you, no excuses. "He was being rude," your first statement. Ginger the sole witness, incomprehensible. All tears and snot. Dick sees her picture and it's the girl in the ambulance, same small shoulders and slouched figure like the worlds eating her. DeVore was trying something, allegedly, from her account and yours. Wound up and drunk, then you pulled a gun. Case closed.

But that's not your gun. Dick remembers: the small metal revolver that could fit in your hand, the make of it. You had slipped it out of your purse, kept it concealed by your hip, standby on your side that time you were walking down the block home from the bar during Halloween, two men yelling behind you for passing off their coy flirting. A bold one reached for your arm, and the barrel was on his side, your smile all light and fluttery like a dare. Dick had made it in time. Wrapped his hand around your wrist and lowered it gently, the sight of him sending the two men scampering away like brittle alley cats. "I wasn't going to," you'd said, stashing the gun away. You were chuckling to yourself. "My aim's so bad, I'd probably missed."

A Smith & Wesson 442, 38 special caliber. Something cheap and easily concealed. Yet the murder weapon was a Sig Sauer P365 AXG Legion, added AXG Grip Module, custom gray frame finish. Semi-Auto, 9mm Luger caliber. One thousand-fiver hundred online, higher underground and unregistered.

Crime scene photos don't give much away. Blood splatter on the bedsheets; the gun fired down at him based on the pattern. Entry wound on the side of DeVore's head. Clean exit wound. Bruising on the sides below his ribs. The autopsy hasn't been performed yet, so Dick extrapolates what he can. They're botchy and pulsing with blood underneath the skin — blunt force trauma, is his best guess. No way you'd cause that with a punch. Yet there aren't any notes of other object used to attack except for the Sig Sauer. Either the forensics team is duller than should be acceptable, or they saw little reason to search further on a solved case. It makes his jaw clench. The city doesn't want to be saved, Barbara said once. It resurfaces in the back of Dick's mind, for a second, a moment where he doesn't know what else to think about.

You're on the news come morning. No break through story, no special segment. What shows across Dick's television is a three minute report with your mugshot that he catches over a cup of earl grey while mapping out underground firearm sellers on his kitchen island. It's you from the night before; hair smoothed out now, smudged eyeliner wiped away, shoulders straight and broad. Dick pauses, sets his mug down. Over your throat, like a blossoming necklace of thorns, strangulation marks raw and sickening.

His stomach convulses. His head is in his hands, eyes closed as the bile fizzes and settles like acid. That wasn't in the file, that wasn't in the file.

[cafeoa]

𝐂𝐚𝐟é 𝐜𝐨𝐧 𝐥𝐞𝐜𝐡𝐞 | 𝐒𝐞𝐫𝐢𝐞𝐬

You’re the mutt in the light - an angel in the night [Dick Grayson x reader] pt 1 | pt 2 coming soon… pt 3

Those who turn away from the light wallow in the darkness of their own shame. or, a man is murdered. You've killed him. But Dick knows you, and he just wants to help.

[cafeoa]

trope i really like is self-loathing characters desperate for the catharsis of punishment for frankly rather selfish reasons who r also obsessed with repeatedly pressing others into hating them and hurting them as essentially a method of self harm. yes baby continue making it worse for urself and everybody around u instead of doing an actually productive and effective journey of improvement and redemption

[cafeoa]

pairing: dick grayson x reader

word count: 3.2k (i think?)

warnings: rape mention (as per dick's canon)

notes: i keep thinking of applying one of my favourite manga/manhwa tropes with dick specifically, because it works so well, but i don't particularly care to put in the work of setting up that it'd take for it to land as well as it could. maybe later. as it is, i'll give you the quick rundown because i spent two days writing it lol

something ugly about you has made you undeserving of romance. you have spent your entire life puzzling out what it is and how to fix it. nothing much is special about you: the matter’s far from isolation, or becoming any particular sort of pariah. perhaps that'd be easier to explain. no. people leave you alone, your friends cherish you, your family loves you. it is not that you have not known affection, but that you have and so when you crash against the wall that horrible first time, it hurts all the more.

nothing changes after that. there is always a limit to where your interest can reach, unnamed but palpable. a line you cannot cross. it seems to you as if the entire world has reached a silent consensus during a meeting to which your attendance was not required and your input unnecessary. why would it be? this is not about you. after all, your ability to love has not become impaired. you like people. you’ve fallen in love. but who has ever loved you back?

this one facet of life has been closed off to you entirely, and you’ve been chased away from all attempts to form a romantic bond with unspoken threats of shame and implications of disgust. (a bit much of a display just for the offense of being little old you. you come to regard the matter so as you grow older and start curating some self-respect. it still stings as badly as scrubbing your skin raw under hot water, but not all the loathing is directed inward nowadays.)

regardless, you’ve learnt that you are undesirable, and nothing you can say or do will change that. you must be content with the other shapes that love can take. nothing that you want matters whatsoever.

you meet dick grayson one summer evening under exceedingly normal circumstances. you do not know about heroes or rogues, no batmans or nightwings. the person that crosses the threshold is none other than dick grayson, the handsome young man. suspicion does not cross anybody’s mind, and if it does, it comes only a good couple of thoughts after his darling smile and shapely thighs.

obviously you like him immediately. what’s not to like? he’s gorgeous.

you react to him with the tense wariness of someone hardened by years of useless crushes. trying to avoid him. trying to be normal when you invariably cannot. it’s fine. it’ll be fine.

you still crush on him.

it’s inevitable, at this point. he’s too pretty, too smart, too kind not to draw you in. every interaction comes a rush of exhilarating fear. at times, you manage to subdue yourself into normalcy, hang out with him with as much naturalness as you can muster. but then he does something particularly attractive and you’re back in square one, shoulders drawn together and so short with him he probably gets emotional whiplash. it’s as exhausting for you as it must be for him, and he still reacts to it with grace. it doesn’t help.

through your concerted efforts to be normal, or at least appear as much, you and dick become friends. not great friends, mind you, but good enough that you start hanging out on your own without any of your mutual friends present. and you only spend about three hours total pondering the meaning behind the phrasing of his texts. that’s gotta be some form of progress, right?

he sits at a little table away from the window, and beams when you arrive. coffee’s on him and conversation’s on you. you’ve got more in common than you first thought, but you go back and forth between imagining it must be fate and squashing down delusion, telling yourself you’re blowing it out of proportion.

at one point in time, a beautiful, sultry-looking woman approaches the table.

you and dick tense immediately, like you both know what’s coming. sure as ever, the woman smiles and asks for his number. you look away politely, sip at your drink. the proximity makes it useless to pretend you’re not eavesdropping (though it can hardly be called that when she came to your table), but you take care not to make any faces that’d give away the little storm brewing in your stomach.

this sucks, you think, glancing away from dick’s bland mask of politeness. all of it is hopeless and it still sucks.

you think about running off to the bathroom, get as far as shifting on your seat when dick shoots you a troubled look. the woman’s been at it for a little more than is appropriate. a minute or so more of insistence and she’ll be stretching the boundaries of her own dignity too far. you look away with pressed lips and move your hands under the table.

your alarm beeps.

“oh, shit, dude,” you gasp, hoping to land somewhere in the ballpark of realism. “It’s almost seven. we’ve got to go, or else we’re gonna miss the movie.”

dick gives the woman his apologies and swiftly runs out of the café with you hot on his heels. on the way to the movie theatre, you wanna ask the million questions running through your head—why’d he reject her? didn’t he like her? did he not think she was pretty? who is pretty for him? what’s his taste in partners? is he seeing someone?—but you know it’s a futile endeavor. what will you even get out of that? it’s clear dick didn’t enjoy the interaction either. you make small talk about something else, trying to draw his attention away from whatever conflicted feelings he’s moored in right now. just because you like him doesn’t mean you can’t be a good friend to him.

it’s a short walk. soon enough, he’s all smiles again. in the line for the popcorn stand, another two girls come up to him, this time much younger than you two. he’s nicer with them than he was before, but he rejects them all unequivocally.

“doesn’t it annoy you?” you can’t help but ask. when dick raises an elegant eyebrow, you panic and backpedal so hard you might as well have driven a truck through a storefront.

“a bit,” dick says, ignoring your rambling. you shut your mouth firmly closed when he gives you a sidelong glance, and continues, so very casually, “it’s worse when it comes from a friend rather than a stranger. so many people just try to befriend me because they’re looking for a relationship, or they want access to my body. it’s… tiring. i’m sure you can relate.”

“ah,” you say. your tongue feels numb, but you’re burning up under the weight of his gaze. “no. I don’t really get harassed like that or, um, asked out.”

“huh.” dick blinks. “really?”

“yeah,” you force out. blessedly, the attendant calls your attention. you jostle dick forward. “look, it’s our turn.”

dick orders popcorn. you get a large slushy that you’re not gonna finish. you make him pay. he complies with no question. inside the theatre, you spend all two hours and sixteen minutes of the showing in absolute silence. it is not so strange to be fixated on the movie, but you’re usually a little more chatty. under normal circumstances, you’d eagerly take the opportunity to lean closer to him, whisper something about the main character’s penchant for gummies and its relation to the degradation of the American working class. he’d glance at you and thoughtfully smile, and you’d catch a whiff of his cologne when you straightened.  for the rest of the movie, the twinkle of his eye as he forwent the film for your conversation would be all you’d think about.

such is not the case now.

you can tell when you’ve been summarily dismissed. in fact, you appreciate when people are subtle about their rejections. it’s always all the more humiliating when they feel the need to bring it out into the open, like your affections have been so blatant they must be commented on, debated.

the rest of the evening is spent convincing yourself that this is good, that this means it’ll be better for yourself going forward. you’ll be less distracted, if anything. dick’s attempts to discuss the movie with you afterwards fall flat, as the only thing you really want is to get home and stare at your ceiling.

when you’ve reached your apartment door, and are turning to enter after a hurried goodbye, dick calls your name.

“look,” he says, running a hand through his hair unsurely. “I don’t usually do this.”

oh, no. dread fills you up. he’s breaking up with you and you’re not even dating.

you swallow. “dick—”

“I like you a lot,” he interrupts. your teeth clang the way you shut up so fast. in fact, you feel a little dizzy. he continues before you can even process that first sentence. “I think you and I could be really good friends, and I’d love if we could continue seeing each other to, you know, hang out and talk. I do truly appreciate your insight. is that okay?”

you blink fast some three or four times. it must be comical, the face you’re making, because the corner of dick’s lips pulls upward despite him trying to keep a serious air.

“I thought we were already friends…?” you say, at a loss for anything else to say.

“yes!” he beams. “we are.”

“okay,” you respond, perplexed. this is so far out of left field. “um. text me when you’re home?”

“yeah.” he grins. gorgeous grin, to be sure, but why? “for sure.”

“cool.” you give him an awkward thumbs up and scurry inside.               

it is… baffling. you spend all of that night wide awake and pondering. dick must’ve misconstrued something, or either you missed a crucial step in your relationship. otherwise the end to that evening makes absolutely no sense. the only thing you can conjure up is that dick must reject a lot of people who, like he said, try to befriend him only to get with him or worse, only to fuck, and it’s not very likely most of those people stay in his life once it is clear he won’t budge on the matter. the fact that you didn’t immediately turn your back on him must’ve come to him as a pleasant surprise.

it’s sad. like, really fucking sad, actually.

that very sadness—and the memory of his handsome, bright grin—turns your outlook inside out. why do you like dick? clearly he’s got the looks and the personality, but do you really know him? what do you know of him? you make a list of things you’ve learned about him in the short time of knowing him. it’s not long.

you come to the conclusion, mortifyingly so, that you don’t, in fact, like dick grayson. that, if anything, the only thing you like is the idea of the boyfriend he could be, which is not the boyfriend that he is (you know nothing about that). it’s the social acumen inherent in bagging such a hottie, and the sparkling sexual attraction bound around it, that really prompt your crushing. it’s not dick as a person. frankly, you think, a little hysterically, could be anyone, really. didn’t even have to be dick. he was just there, the handsomest person in the room. an apt target for the voracious hunger of your heart. you’d mooned and mooned over him for ages and it turns out it wasn’t even about him.

god, you’re such an asshole.

in penance, you endeavor to actually get to know dick without the embarrassment of a crush between you. and it does, in fact, help. dick’s eager to get to know you too, now that you’ve both formally acknowledged you’re friends (such a weird practice, fresh out of kindergarten behavior, but, as you soon find out, dick is weird about plenty and not entirely well-adjusted as an adult). you go on outings together, attend one another’s events, text sporadically throughout the day. you learn which video games dick likes, you tell him which movies are your favorites. it’s fun and light and uncomplicated now that you’ve freed yourself from the constraints of romantic expectation.

not everything’s good. dick’s got bad habits, which grate on you. is it so difficult to put the stupid toilet seat down? can he not learn to chop vegetables in chunks smaller than an elephant’s baby teeth? can he, for the love of god, stop yelling at the tv during horror films?  he’s got some serious character flaws, too. you find about those a lot more slowly, but they don’t cause too much trouble.

you fight one or two times due to dick suddenly abandoning you in the middle of an outing with no regard for your safety, and his tendency to get pissy instead of saying whatever’s upsetting him upfront when he knows, you’ve warned him that you’re stupidly thoughtless about your actions at times. all those are things you wouldn’t have come to experience if you hadn’t given the man a chance to actually be a friend. it’s kind of heartening, actually, to have come so far.

sometimes your crush rears up its head in the middle of nowhere. it’s kind of hopeless by now, but you can’t help the fact that dick’s attractive. neither can he, anyway. you just watch him sometimes, the way the sun hits his eyes, lashes sweeping over his cheeks. it makes you go tongue-tied and silly, but the moment always passes. it has to pass. you struggle against it, recall every time dick has upset you or insulted you in one way or the other. some days it’s easy as buttering toast, others you can barely think around the searing heat of your desire. those are bad days for all involved.

one evening, when you’ve grown close enough you’ve begun to think about dick grayson as maybe, possibly, only-if-he-says-so-too your closest friend, he tells you about catalina.

he does it over the phone line, during your almost-nightly calls. over the months, you’ve taken up the practice of teasing him about handsome people he clearly finds attractive in a desperate bid to divert attention and train yourself for when you have to do it for real. this is not one of such cases, and as soon as you realize this, you sober up immediately.

he says it so simply. talks about it like it’s just a hazard of life. there’s a tight hardness at the edge of his voice, but other than that, he speaks like it’s normal Tuesday for him.

not so much for you.

“is it okay if I come over?” you request over the line.

for a moment, the only thing you hear is dick breathe. “yeah,” he croaks, and you’re bolting out the room immediately.

you don’t know how to react to this other than with a shaky sort of desperation. it’s been years since it happened. there’s nothing you can do about it now. there’s something big he’s leaving out, which you notice but don’t point out. a big lump forms on your throat as he speaks. dick tells you when you arrive that the woman is behind bars for an unrelated crime and the only way you stop yourself from wishing ill on her out loud is the fact he looks so politely disjointed, you know your fury will only startle him.

and you feel it so frightfully, the fury.

you love dick, you realize. beyond the fancies and the underlying attraction, you love dick as a person, as a friend. he’s one of yours now.

the evening morphs into a casual sleepover. you don’t interrogate him, and he seems torn between wanting to say more and grateful you’re not prying. you keep yourself open to the possibility, but also try to comfort him as best you can. you make dinner. you put on a movie. you talk and joke and quietly watch. he invites you on the bed with him because his couch is a nightmare to sleep in and his guest room is “unavailable”, whatever that means. you don’t even think about it, just follow.

lying together under the sheets with the lights off, the rest of your feelings bubble up to the surface.

you ask before you clasp his hands between yours and look into his shiny eyes in the darkness. you try to tell him, how this single evening and all those that came before turned over your loyalty to him. how he can come to you for anything he ever wants or needs—your ear, your care, your protection. how much you appreciate his trust and how much you wish you could make anything, everything better for him. how much he deserves it.

“I’ll never leave you now,” you vow with fierce conviction, searching his eyes for any signs of doubt. any other time you would’ve questioned this statement with the sheer weight of infinite possibilities, but not now. tonight, truth is absolute and in your hand. “they will never take me from you. I will always be on your side, by your side. i’m serious, grayson. you’re not getting rid of me.”

a glimpse of  a watery smile is the only thing you see before dick throws his arms around you and buries his face in your neck. “couldn’t dream of it,” he whispers into your hair.

you hug him back as tightly as he is, murmuring platitudes and running your fingers through his hair. he falls asleep like that, in the cradle of your arms. he feels secure enough to do so, and you feel both proud and nauseous about it considering the secret you keep.

that he’s told you this at all, that he’s trusted you with such a thing—you know how big it is. you know you can never betray him.

you consider your inherent monstrosity, that little unspeakable thing that bars your from that special kind of love. you understand, firmly, that any desire you feel will never be received eagerly and joyfully. not by him or anyone else.  in silent fury, you vow to die before you be like her, to bestow upon this man your grotesque wanting with no regard for his own desire, for the integrity of his being.

that night, you press a kiss to dick grayson’s hair and let him go forever.

.

the next morning, dick watches as you leave. you turn back one last time to wave at him from the parking lot, a bright smile and tussled hair you didn’t bother to brush. you wear out the clothes he lent you to sleep, so harried last night in your haste to come over that you’d simply forgotten to pack pajamas. he suspects you hadn’t planned to stay the night at all, but he’d been damned if he’d let you go yesterday.

you’re pretty. he’s always thought so, but this morning, you’re prettier than ever. it’s the radiance of your heart shining through.

I will always be by your side, you’d said last night. you’d meant it completely, then. dick had been dazed, overcome. he couldn’t take the brightness of your eyes, the surety of your affection. he’d buried his head in your neck and fallen asleep breathing in the smell of your shampoo. in the morning, he’d woken up with your fingers carding through his hair and the gentle warmth of your body against his.

that was nice. he wonders what he has to do to make it happen again.