#Data Files (headcanons) | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

kururreal · 2 months ago

Text

“textbook definition of unhealthy relationships and codependence, the sinner needs the saint like one needs air to breathe.”

𖢷 ۪ ࣪ ﹙☆﹚ ࣪ ִ HEADCANONS ‹3

synopsis: you’re a new villain in to town. your villain motivations? to make the world lazier. “Hardworking people deserve a break too!” you said when you decided to be a villain.

notes: when you have a banger idea but you’re too shy to request it so you decided to lock in and write it yourself

BRUCE WAYNE / BATMAN :

You, the villain, are unassuming, quiet, playful, and not at all threatening in the traditional sense.

Your ideology?

“Hardworking people deserve rest too.”

That’s it. That’s the threat. That’s the infection.

You're not inciting a rebellion. You’re not taking over Gotham.

You're breaking the tempo.

And Bruce, who has survived purely because of his rhythm, his need to act, to control, to do, doesn’t even know why you bother him so much.

You don’t interrupt his work.

You exist beside it.

And that’s worse.

He doesn’t stalk you.

He doesn’t collect data.

He doesn’t care about you as a person.

What he does is this:

Every time you do something visible, Bruce makes himself forget it.

He catalogs the moment. names, actions, timestamp, visuals.. and then buries it in the Batcomputer under a false keyword, as if tucking away a dead language no one speaks.

Why?

Because something in him knows that if he integrates you, your ideas will change him.

And he cannot change.

So instead, he creates a personal information void around you.

He’s aware of you, sure. But vaguely. He reduces you to fog.

He sees the effects of your actions. lower hospitalizations, spontaneous street naps, people smiling on buses, and each time, instead of analyzing it, he tells himself:

“I must have missed something. That can’t be related.”

You’re a file he deliberately misfiles every single time.

He doesn’t think you’re evil.

He doesn’t even think you’re dangerous.

What you are to him is nonfunctional.

You don’t fit in the machine of Gotham, and yet, you don’t break it either.

That’s what bothers him.

You’re like a light in the Cave that flickers at random. Not bright. Not broken. Just irregular.

And Bruce can’t abide irregularity.

You don’t behave like a threat.

You behave like something Gotham didn’t ask for, didn’t want, but didn’t reject.

And so in his mind, you become a corrupted file.

He won’t delete you.

But he won’t access you either.

He won’t say your name out loud.

He won’t acknowledge your philosophy as real.

He will let you float in a corner of his mind like a half-erased name on a gravestone.

not possession, not violence, not protection.

It’s refusal.

You become the one thing he cannot categorize, assimilate, or dominate. and so his mind begins to loop, stall, fracture around you like code that can’t compile.

He doesn’t shift the world around you.

He shifts his perception of the world so it doesn’t include you.

And that is how he obsesses.

He spends energy every day not thinking about you.

He spends time burying every sign of your ideology beneath noise.

He sees the results of your actions and thinks, “That must be someone else.”

You have become a ghost in his operating system.

And no matter how much he pretends otherwise, he leaves a space for you in the back of his mind. a blank, untouched memory folder that he checks and forgets and checks again.

Over and over.

“Must’ve been the wind” aahhh 🥀🥀

Batman’s brand of platonic yandere here is based not on holding you close, but on keeping you mentally un-formed. The obsession lives in how hard he works to push you out of the framework of his reality, and how much space that act starts to take up inside him.

Think:

“If I look at this thing directly, I might change in a way I can’t reverse. So instead, I’ll trap it in the periphery of my mind and patrol that space every night like a prison guard.”

He’s not protecting you. He’s protecting himself from what knowing you would do to him.

And that’s what makes it yandere. because the compulsion wins anyway.

You become a phantom entry in every report.

He avoids naming you, but you’re in every system, just buried, twisted, refracted.

He avoids thinking of your ideology, but it echoes in his decisions.

He avoids, avoids, avoids! but builds a structure of constant micro-management around the avoidance.

Which is obsession.

When he feels anything about you, he instinctively redirects it.

He feels intrigued → labels it “threat curiosity.”

He feels admiration → labels it “disinformation alert.”

He feels challenged → labels it “cognitive tension.”

He feels something like envy → shuts the thought down completely.

He has trained himself to treat emotion like misinformation.

So anything that comes from you is automatically re-routed into threat analysis, system hygiene, containment strategy. no matter how unrelated.

But the mental effort to keep doing that, day after day?

It’s a mental shrine he doesn’t realize he’s kneeling at.

On paper, he doesn’t care.

In his mind, he’s neutral. Unmoved. Not curious.

But the reality?

He’s built an entire moral firewall around you.

He won’t speak about you aloud.

He won’t let others mention you. (Someone brings you up once. Bruce doesn’t look at them and says “Irrelevant.” Conversation ends.)

He doesn’t allow you to become a symbol, but doesn’t allow you to disappear either.

He refuses to define your motivations. but never stops cataloguing them.

He convinces himself you’re just another anomaly.

But he checks for your presence like people check for ghosts. subtly, religiously, never admitting they believe.

He is obsessed in the most existential way.

Not because he wants to own you.

Not because he wants to protect you.

But because you are the only thing he cannot assimilate into his mental universe, and instead of confronting that?

He builds an invisible mausoleum to you in his psyche.

And guards it.

For years.

He isn’t trying to break you or save you. He’s trying to neutralize your presence in his mental ecosystem… and failing.

And because he fails, he’s doomed to orbit you in silence, forever maintaining a structure whose entire purpose is to pretend you aren’t there.

And that’s obsession. That’s love twisted beyond recognition. That’s yandere.

He has built you a throne by refusing to look at it.

Forget usual tropes for a sec. Strip it to its bones.

At its deepest level, yandere means: an overwhelming, irrational fixation on a person

That fixation overrides normal logic or self-control. the individual builds their world around the target. emotionally, physically, mentally. often, the fixation is masked under something else: love, logic, concern, etc.

Yandere doesn’t have to mean “I’ll kill for you” or “You’re mine.”

It just has to mean:

“You exist inside my head constantly and I cannot, will not, let you go. even if I pretend I already have.”

Instead of confronting how you disturb his inner world, Batman builds a system of false neutrality to protect himself from what you represent.

That system is a mental fortress he has to: Maintain daily, monitor constantly, patch every time you appear in the news, a file, a video feed

That’s not analysis.

That’s ritual.

He isn’t simply keeping tabs on you.

He is spending psychic energy to remove you from reality, over and over, because even acknowledging your presence honestly risks destabilizing the framework of who he is.

That’s obsession.

your ideology, your message, “hardworking people deserve rest too”, haunts him.

Why?

Because it presents a world that could have existed if he hadn’t become Batman.

A world without brutal endurance.

A world where people don’t have to suffer to be good.

A world that would have told a young Bruce Wayne: “You can stop now. You don’t have to carry all of this alone.”

That phantom world becomes his obsession.

You’re just the vessel… or avatar of it.

So he locks you, and that world, in a cold vault in his brain labeled “Irrelevant.”

And yet he checks that vault every night.

That’s not indifference. that’s yandere.

MOST yandere want to control the person directly.

Bruce wants to control his mental exposure to you.

He designs internal systems to minimize your impact.

He flags your files as “non-priority” even when he knows they’re not.

He gaslights his own mind, mentally replacing your name with a symbol or error code.

This isn’t disinterest. This is meticulous anti-engagement.

You don’t get this level of anti-contact unless someone is emotionally overwhelmed and trying to stabilize.

So instead of controlling you, he controls the narrative of you in his mind.

Every day.

Without fail.

And that is a form of possession.

Yandere fixation often comes down to one thing: “Even if this hurts me, I will not stop.”

And that is exactly what Bruce is doing.

This elaborate denial system drains him.

He loses time trying to overwrite mentions of you.

He fails to adapt to shifting public reaction because he won’t acknowledge it.

He’s sleep-deprived and short with the Batfamily because your ideology is spreading, and he doesn’t have a plan that doesn’t require acknowledging it.

He could simplify his life by just confronting it.

But he won’t.

Because once he lets you in, even a little, he has to ask: “What if they’re right? What if Gotham doesn’t need me? What if I’ve made everything worse by grinding myself down into a myth instead of a man?”

So he keeps the shrine intact.

Keeps the ghost memory clean.

And tells himself he’s “above it.”

He’s not.

He’s drowning in it.

That’s yandere.

he doesn’t act all that different when you pull another scheme on the town either.

After each scheme, the evidence piles up.

You’re doing real things.

Visible things.

You’re changing Gotham. even if temporarily.

And that should trigger his usual protocols: evaluation, threat assessment, countermeasures.

Instead?

He goes back into his logs from that night… and redacts your name.

He replaces it with [NULL-AGENT], or leaves the field blank.

Even to himself, in his own files, you don’t have a name.

Because names are portals to meaning. and meaning leads to confrontation. and confrontation means feeling something.

So he surgically erases the connection.

But never the event.

Because he needs the pattern.

He needs to keep watching.

He just can’t admit why.

He doesn’t stop you.

He doesn’t support you.

He doesn’t admit you exist.

But he does..

Monitors obsessively

Catalogues everything

Redacts it afterward

Pretends it doesn’t affect him

Leaves space for you in every mental calculation he makes

He never says your name.

But he’s memorized every word you’ve ever said.

Yandere not through violence.

Not through romance.

But through negative space. a haunting, ritualized denial of feeling that takes over his life like rot beneath the floorboards.

He wants the idea of you contained.

And when containment becomes impossible, he builds a recursive denial loop that eventually takes over a significant part of his psychological energy.

He is obsessed with the erasure of you. and that erasure takes more effort, focus, and ritual than simply knowing you ever would.

And that is pure yandere.

self-destructive emotional orbit disguised as control.

NIGHTWING / DICK GRAYSON :

I’m hungry

but thats besides the point ig 💔💔🥀🥀🥀😭😭😭

Dick’s optimism is real. but it’s a choice, not a constant.

Unlike Bruce, whose default is grim pragmatism, Dick forces light into darkness. He jokes, he smiles, because someone has to carry hope.

So when [Name] comes along with this ideology, “Even heroes deserve to rest”, Dick can’t accept it. Not because he thinks it’s wrong, but because if he accepts it, the weight of all the years he’s forced himself to smile and keep going would hit him like a truck.

You aren’t just a villain. you’re a mirror. A personified version of everything Dick has denied himself.

“If what you say is true, then I’ve been killing myself all these years for nothing.”

He can’t let that in. So he splits like a trained acrobat, balancing on an emotional wire.

He holds himself to impossible standards.

He’s not just trying to live up to Bruce, he’s trying to exceed him and not become him. That’s a suffocating duality.

So when you start telling people to rest, to step back from impossible expectations, Dick panics internally.

Because he’s spent decades performing like his survival depends on it. because it did. He fears that if people stop pushing themselves, they’ll become like Bruce's failures.. or worse, get hurt. And maybe.. maybe! they’ll see that his whole life was built on unsustainable effort.

You threaten to unmake the foundation he’s built everything on.

Dick tries to carry burdens solo, just like Bruce.

But unlike Bruce, he hides it with charm instead of silence. That makes him even more fragile, because no one sees the cracks.

When you start gaining influence, maybe even convincing other heroes or citizens to burn out less, Dick takes it personally. Not out of spite, but fear.

If others believe you, they’ll stop relying on him.

He needs to be the one holding it together. He needs to be the one who never stops.

Because if he rests, who picks up the pieces?

If he breaks, who’s left to smile when everything goes dark?

“You’re not helping them. You’re just giving them an excuse to give up. And if they give up… I don’t get to.”

That’s the twist.

He doesn’t stalk you or chain you up.

He stalks your philosophy, kills your influence, because your truth breaks his lie.

Dick becomes obsessed not with saving [Name] … but with protecting the rest of the world from becoming like them.

It’s not “I love you so I’ll keep you safe.”

It’s “I love you, so I’ll make sure no one ever agrees with you.”

Because you are right.

And Dick knows it.

He’s the golden boy who’s been running on fumes since he was ten years old. But if he ever admits that [Name]’s ideology makes sense, he’ll crumble. Gotham, Blüdhaven, Bruce… they all depend on him staying functional. So he splits his mind.

He lets you rest. but never the world around them.

Dick becomes a reverse-yandere, a cognitive paradox.

He worships your ideology. but crushes it in everyone else.

He protects you. but makes sure you’ll always be alone in your beliefs.

He creates a world where only you are allowed to rest. by making everyone else run harder.

He doesn’t hurt you, doesn’t lock you up. He lets you spread your message freely. But every time someone listens to you, he finds them, and breaks them. Quietly. Subtly. Emotionally.

He turns them back into gear-turners.

Not because he wants to stop you. but because he can’t let your world exist.

Dick Grayson is a caretaker to the bone.

Big Brother. Team Leader. Gotham's good cop.

He’s spent his entire life believing that if he’s strong enough, if he just keeps going, he can protect everyone.

And the second he stops?

He believes people die.

He can’t stop. He can’t rest. He’s addicted to being the one who doesn’t fall. Not because of pride, but because he knows what happens when no one catches you. He lived it.

So when you come into the world preaching rest. forced or not, he sees a paradox.

One that short-circuits everything he is.

Because you’re right.

You’re not violent. You’re not crazy. You’re gentle.

Your message is: “You’ve done enough. You can sit down now.”

But if the world sits down, who gets hurt first?

He lets you rest.

You become the only one in the world who gets to stop. You become untouchable. he won’t lock you up, won’t fight you directly, won’t even argue too hard.

Why?

Because he’s built an altar out of you.

He’s made you the sacred space where the truth is allowed to exist. but nowhere else.

Like a church locked in a burning city.

He isolates your ideology into a vacuum so he never has to face it spilling into his world.

That’s why every time someone listens to you, he hunts them down. not violently, not openly, but surgically.

He sabotages their careers. Distracts them with greater threats. Assigns them “just one more mission.”

He puts weight back on their shoulders until they forget what you said.

This isn’t a man who doesn’t believe in you.

This is a man who believes in you so deeply that he has to quarantine your truth to keep from falling apart.

Because if he admits it’s okay to rest… then everything he’s endured becomes grief that didn’t have to happen.

And Dick Grayson, the big brother of the entire damn DC Universe, doesn’t know how to forgive himself for needless suffering.

So instead of letting the world change, he clutches it tighter.

Not for power. Not for dominance.

But because if he lets go… he’ll never get back up again.

A traditional yandere obsesses over a person.

But Dick?

He obsesses over what you represents. their ideology of rest, mercy, and release. It’s not about owning your body. It’s about containing your truth. That’s way scarier, way more insidious.

This is obsession disguised as protection.

Dick does all this not because he wants your love, it’s because he needs you to stay still.

If you moved, if you evolved, if your message grew teeth.. his mind would collapse under the weight of everything he’s been repressing.

So he isolates you like a relic.

He fossilizes you in peace. He builds a shrine around your message and worships it only because it’s locked away.

That’s yandere logic:

“If I can’t have you safely, no one else can have you at all.”

But instead of killing you or locking you in a basement, he does the reverse:

He builds a world around you that ensures you’re always the only one like you.

That’s obsession.

Yandere types don’t just love. they love destructively through control.

Dick’s version is emotional ecosystem manipulation. he isn’t trying to control you, he’s controlling everything else around you, for you.

He lets you believe you’re winning.

He makes the world harder so you stay soft.

He sabotages anyone who listens to you so you never lose your uniqueness.

He keeps your ideology “pure” by strangling it before it grows.

In his mind, he’s not harming anyone. he’s preserving balance. because if too many people follow you, the system breaks. And if the system breaks, he can’t function anymore.

Yandere logic is rationalized delusion.

He thinks he’s keeping you safe and the world stable. But what he’s really doing is sacrificing everything, including truth and progress, on the altar of his fear of emotional collapse.

Traditional yanderes cling to a person.

Dick clings to his role, his identity, his mission. But when you show up, they unwrite all of that.

So he develops a warped dependency:

“I need you to exist. but I also need you to never succeed.”

That’s obsession. A cognitive loop.

He depends on your ideology to understand his own fatigue.

But he also has to suppress it, because if it becomes true for others, he’ll realize he’s spent his life breaking himself unnecessarily.

So he gets trapped.

You become the axis his emotional survival spins on.

“If I destroy you, I’m a monster.

If I believe you, I collapse.

So I’ll protect you in stillness. I’ll love you in silence.

I’ll stop the world for you, just so you never move.”

That’s obsession. That’s yandere.

But it’s cold. Quiet. High-functioning.

It’s not a knife to your throat. it’s a smile at your door, while the whole city outside burns itself out under his watchful eye.

You shut down power to government buildings.

You freeze hospital schedules so burned-out doctors are forced to sleep.

You crash commuter systems so workers have to stay home and finally breathe.

You make rest happen. through crime, disruption, and brilliant techy soft-sabotage.

What does Dick do?

He shows up after.

He sweeps in quietly.

He doesn’t fight you. Doesn’t confront you.

He undoes your work. quietly, efficiently, like a fixer for God.

He doesn’t tell the press.

Doesn’t report you to the League.

Doesn’t even tell the Batfam.

He erases you.

Why?

Because acknowledging you publicly would mean legitimizing you.

“If they know your name, they might listen. If they hear your message, they might agree. I can’t let that happen.”

So he scrubs your fingerprints off the crime scene and tells everyone it was a “systems glitch.”

He redirects citizens to other sources of burnout.

He lies to protect his world from you. while keeping you safe.

If you go too big, like shutting down the entire city for 48 hours, he’ll find you.

He won’t chain you up. He won’t scream.

He’ll interrogate you like a friend, but with that underlying edge of desperation:

“Why are you making it so hard to protect you?”

If Bruce or another hero starts closing in on your identity, Dick pulls strings. He diverts attention, falsifies data, leaks false suspects.

He'd rather lie to Bruce, than let you face consequences.

Because if the world punishes you, that means your message is wrong. and Dick can’t afford to believe that.

You’re a villain, yes. And Nightwing is the planner, the strategist, the one who always has a backup plan.

But you?

You're the one person in the world he refuses to plan against.

He’ll have tactics for if Batman turns rogue.

He’ll have files on every villain in Blüdhaven.

But for you? Nothing.

Because making a plan against you would mean preparing for the possibility of having to stop you.

And he can’t admit he’d ever do that.

So instead of making a plan against you, he makes one around you:

He assigns his own allies to far-off cases.

He keeps the city too busy to notice you.

He works twice as hard to minimize the damage. so that he pays the price for your restfulness, not the citizens.

“You do what you have to. I’ll carry the burden. That’s how we keep the balance.”

He lets you be a villain. as long as it doesn’t break his world too hard.

He obsessively cleans up after you.

He refuses to punish you, because punishing you means admitting your message might be wrong. or worse, that it’s right and the world is too broken to receive it.

And when you do go too far?

He doesn't punish you like a villain.

He mourns you like a temple falling.

RED HOOD / JASON TODD :

Jason Todd, now Red Hood, exists in a perpetual state of restlessness. His experiences, his trauma, his regrets. every facet of his life pushes him into overdrive, constantly vigilant, always in motion. But Jason doesn’t just want to save Gotham, he wants to save the people who don’t know how to rest. This is where the villain, [name], comes into play.

You're a new kind of criminal in Gotham. You’re not here to hurt people. You’re here to stop the grind. You’ve shut down exploitative factories, turned Gotham’s 24-hour systems into 8-hour ones, and made millionaires suddenly lose sleep over their unpaid workers. Your message?

“Hardworking people deserve rest too.”

Your gadgets don't kill; they sedate. Your traps don’t wound; they force naps. You target overworked cops, overclocked servers, hospital staff being stretched thin. and give them "mandatory vacations" by knocking them unconscious and stashing them in luxury pods with automatic IV drips and calming soundscapes. You’re not killing the system, you’re sedating it.

Jason sees your work as both deeply terrifying and a form of mercy. Jason doesn’t love you in the traditional sense. He’s not infatuated with you romantically, but he’s consumed by a need to "protect" you. though not in the way a typical protector would.

He becomes obsessed with you because he sees himself in you, but he cannot comprehend your methods. You’re offering peace in a way he cannot afford. While Jason cannot rest, cannot stop fighting, he understands the value of what you're doing. Yet, he doesn’t believe you’re truly ready for the consequences of your actions. He thinks your idealism will destroy you, and he believes Gotham isn’t ready for the world you're crafting. he’s convinced you’re running a ticking time bomb with your serene philosophy.

Jason doesn’t try to stop you through traditional villain-villain conflict. He doesn’t engage you in a direct, action-heavy way. Instead, he disrupts your ability to rest. Jason sees your "restful" state as a dangerous lull. one that will eventually fall apart when Gotham’s chaos comes crashing back in. To protect you, he starts a bizarre game where he becomes the embodiment of the sleepless world you’re trying to escape.

His presence is a paradox. He invades your peaceful moments, constantly stirring the edges of your tranquility with his aggressive, sleepless energy. He creates an emotional disturbance, testing how well you can truly escape the constant noise of the world, challenging your philosophy by showing you the emotional toll of your ideas. When you induce calm in someone, Jason finds ways to intrude into their peace with intrusive, violent thoughts. not to hurt them, but to make them aware of their own fragility. Every time you successfully put someone into a peaceful state, Jason shakes their emotional core, revealing cracks in your logic and philosophy.

It’s almost like a battle of rest versus unrest. Jason exists to remind people, and you, that peace and rest are always fleeting, never truly attainable, especially in a world as broken as Gotham.

Jason doesn’t just disrupt your peace directly; he wants to get you to rest, but only on his terms. He believes that if you’re truly dedicated to your cause, you need to experience the exhaustion of never resting yourself. he pushes you to the limit, using psychological tactics and subtle actions to make you feel how much it costs to give peace to others. Jason's philosophy is one of balance: people need rest, yes, but they need to earn it. He believes in suffering as a pathway to true peace. so he will drag you into conflict with others, forcing you to witness the world you’re trying to escape, to remind you that peace is never without consequence.

Jason doesn't want to admit it, but the truth is that he is always balancing on the edge of his own philosophy. He’s constantly questioning how much violence he’s willing to accept in the name of justice. He feels responsible for the people he saves, but that responsibility sometimes leads him into morally gray areas that others (like Batman) might avoid.

Your Ideology of Rest offers a form of balance that Jason can’t have. You promote peace. an idea Jason finds both appealing and terrifying. Peace is something Jason craves but feels he cannot have, because in his mind, it comes at a cost. You represent everything that he can never fully embrace. a world where rest, calm, and healing are possible.

Despite his desire to help, Jason sees the limits of his own effectiveness. He constantly finds himself fighting a losing battle. especially when he’s forced to kill or break the rules to get things done. This guilt doesn’t just disappear, even if he justifies his actions. In this way, Jason sees you as a direct reflection of his failings. because your idea of "rest" is a form of escape from the constant cycle of violence he feels trapped in.

Your villainy challenges Jason’s worldview. He wants people to be able to rest, too, but he doesn't think they can without confronting the darkness. The fact that you offer rest and peace without addressing the world’s systemic issues, without violence or force, doesn’t sit right with him. He believes the world doesn’t allow for a peaceful escape, and that by indulging in rest, you're turning a blind eye to the suffering that still exists.

Jason Todd’s relationship with you embodies obsession, though it’s not the romantic obsession seen in more typical yandere tropes. Instead, his obsession is philosophical, emotional, and protective. He becomes obsessed with your ideology of peace, rest, and tranquility. He’s fixated on the idea that you’re offering people an escape from the brutality of Gotham, and he feels that you are naive in your attempt to do so. This obsession goes beyond just being fixated on you as a person. it extends to your worldview, your methods, and the dangerous implications he believes they hold.

A yandere’s hallmark is the intensity of their emotions. Jason’s feelings for you are extreme, but they aren’t purely driven by romantic attraction. they stem from the emotional weight of his own trauma and the desperation to protect you from what he perceives as an impending downfall. The emotional intensity comes from his need to challenge your beliefs and make you see the harsh realities he’s experienced. His obsession manifests as an irrational emotional attachment to your ideology and to the idea of “saving” you, even if it means trying to disrupt your peace in the process.

Jason’s yandere qualities manifest in the obsessive protectiveness he feels toward you. While this is often a romantic trait in yandere characters, in Jason’s case, it’s platonic and ideological. He feels a responsibility to “protect” you from what he believes to be your own misguided philosophy. His version of protection doesn’t involve traditional displays of violence or possessiveness but instead focuses on interfering with your peace in order to teach you a harsh lesson.

This protectiveness is grounded in his belief that the world you’re envisioning can’t exist without consequences. He is obsessed with the idea that if you can’t understand the true cost of rest and peace, you’ll be consumed by the very thing you're trying to save people from. So, he becomes the obstacle to your peaceful ideology. not out of malice or romantic desire, but because he truly believes that you need to be "saved" from your own perspective.

Jason becomes an obstacle to your ideology, and this emotional and intellectual opposition is a form of possession: he doesn’t want you to be at peace until he believes you’ve fully realized the harsh truths of the world. His desire to control your thought process and reality (in terms of what you’re trying to create) is a more subtle, intellectual possession compared to traditional yandere tropes, but it’s still a possession that keeps you constantly aware of his presence, both physically and mentally.

While Jason’s violent tendencies are not typically directed toward you, they do manifest in a way that aligns with traditional yandere themes. He’s willing to create emotional chaos around you and disrupt your peaceful state, even if it means inflicting psychological harm. He may subconsciously justify this as a form of protection or guidance, believing that if you can’t handle the violence and chaos of the world, you’re not truly fit to offer peace to others.

This kind of psychological violence (in the form of emotional and intellectual torment) is a unique variation of yandere behavior, but it still reflects the destructive, obsessive drive to reshape the object of obsession’s reality according to their own ideals.

RED ROBIN / TIM DRAKE :

oh man oh god

You're a new villain in Gotham. No grand heists, no murder, no world-ending plans. Your ideology? “Hardworking people deserve rest too.” You target those who are exploited by their systems. overworked medics, detectives who haven’t taken a day off in years, tech developers being ground down in black-budget labs. You sedate them gently, remove them from the grid, and put them in a hidden “sanctuary” where they’re forced to rest. You’re not killing them. you’re giving them the break they’re too conditioned to take themselves.

But then you target Tim Drake.

And something snaps.

Tim doesn’t “believe” in your ideology. He doesn’t agree with you, doesn’t support you, doesn’t admire you.

But he can’t stop testing your theory.

You’re the most peculiar anomaly he’s ever encountered. A villain who doesn’t destroy, doesn’t corrupt, doesn’t control, just intervenes. Pauses. Unplugs. Your entire mission is enforcing rest on people who can’t or won’t give it to themselves.

You hit him once. Gave him 48 hours of mandatory rest. A blackout, then calmness. When he woke up, he was alone, unhurt, undisturbed.

And yet everything was wrong.

Because it worked.

And now?

You’re not a threat to be stopped.

You’re a theory he’s trying to disprove.

This isn’t affection. It’s not “care.” It’s Tim treating you like a control variable he can’t replicate.

You gave him peace. He doesn’t want to admit it. So now he runs controlled experiments.. on himself.

He denies himself sleep for 96 hours to test what you saw in him.

He simulates your actions in private rooms, carefully documenting if he feels better afterward.

He tracks the neurochemical patterns from the sedative you used and recreates microdoses just to “observe” the mental silence.

He tries to reverse-engineer your ideology purely to disprove it.

But it only leads to more questions.

And it becomes maddening.

Tim stalks you not because he wants to be close, but because you’ve colonized a part of his thinking.

Every action he takes now filters through one question:

“Would [Name] have stopped me here?”

“Would they think I’m too far gone?”

“Is this what they’d call burnout?”

This doesn’t make him softer. It makes him more paranoid.

More fractured.

He doesn’t want you in his life.

He wants to silence you in his mind. but can’t.

So instead, he creates simulations. Replays encounters with you. Runs audio from your speeches. Alters his mission logs to include imaginary counterarguments from you.

You become his silent co-pilot.

Not because he chose you.

But because you infected his process.

He refuses to accept rest as valid unless he can reproduce its logic under his own control. But your rest isn’t logical. It’s disruptive, organic, involuntary. That drives him crazy.

He never confronts you directly again. not out of fear, but because he doesn’t trust himself to stay rational around you.

His obsession is pure analysis, not love. But he’s created an entire side-life where every decision he makes is secretly measured against your ideology.

He still fights. Still breaks bones. But then goes home and stares at a wall for three hours, asking:

“Did I need to go that hard? Or was I proving something to them?”

He doesn’t follow you around in person. he builds predictive models, reads subtle biometric signals from footage, and maps your logic tree. He’s stalking your ideas, not your body.

He keeps this entire obsession secret. Even from himself. He lies to Alfred. Lies to Bruce. He gaslights his own mind, convincing himself it’s “just tactical observation.” But he’s got terabytes of data on you hidden in a server called:

“NON-THREAT_CONFLICT_1197”

He doesn’t want to fix you, love you, save you, or be noticed by you.

He just wants to disprove you.

But every time he tries, he ends up needing the silence again.

That’s the horror.

That’s the devotion.

And he never once admits it aloud.

yandere doesn’t always have to mean a "romantic" obsession or a “classic stalker” who just wants to possess someone. Instead, the obsession itself can be built around any form of psychological fixation that leads to controlling, manipulative, or destructive behavior. often rationalized in some form as being "for the good" of the person they’re obsessed with.

TRAIT 001: The obsessive fixation on the person.

In this case, Tim’s obsession is not about possessing you physically or emotionally. it’s about understanding your mind and controlling his environment through your ideology. You disrupted his sense of order, threw his life into disarray, and now Tim is in an obsessive cycle of trying to understand, rationalize, and prove why your ideology is wrong, how to disprove it, and why it messed him up.

He’s trying to break you down intellectually because, in his mind, you are the key to his peace. And so, his obsession is not simply trying to control you, but control his own feelings and mind in response to you. That level of control fixation is a classic yandere characteristic. He doesn’t want to admit that your ideology might have had a profound effect on him, so he goes to extremes to try and test, analyze, and suppress it.

He can’t stop thinking about you. He doesn’t want to love you, but he can’t ignore the effect you had on him. And that is obsession.

TRAIT 002: Willing to go to extreme lengths for their obsession, sometimes even harming themselves to preserve the fixation.

Here, Tim’s obsession leads him to physically and mentally harm himself. He pushes his body to dangerous limits. denying sleep, taking sedatives in calculated doses to replicate your influence on him, trying to isolate his emotions and just test whether rest actually has an effect on him. These are all self-destructive behaviors motivated by the need to answer the question: “What is it about you that has disrupted my system so completely?”

Tim’s resilience and ability to push past his limits only makes this worse. He never admits how much he needs your ideology to function, but he becomes more and more dependent on recreating it in his life. His obsession with trying to stay in control means he sacrifices his well-being in an effort to “solve” your impact on him.

TRAIT 003: Rationalizing their obsessive behaviors as protective or necessary for the other person’s safety/mental well-being.

While traditional yanderes might directly harm others to keep them close, Tim rationalizes his obsession through self-imposed limits and self-analysis, using your ideology as his lens. He treats it like a protective measure, not just for his own mental stability, but in the belief that this is the “right way” to fix the imbalance you’ve created in him.

Tim has internalized your rest ideology to the point where his obsessive behavior is justified by a warped sense of protection for both himself and, in some cases, Gotham. He believes that if he can just figure out the right answer, the right formula, then everything will click, and he’ll return to the controlled world he once knew. But this is just an illusion. His obsession has trapped him in a never-ending cycle.

He doesn’t want to acknowledge that his need for you is unhealthy. Instead, he tells himself that solving your “mystery” will bring him peace, that it’s a quest for knowledge, not obsession. This self-deception is a classic yandere trait where the obsession is disguised as a rational pursuit.

Tim doesn’t just want to solve the case. This is a personal, psychological conflict. he’s constantly battling himself, wrestling with the temptation to just admit that something about you broke his sense of control. The complexity lies in how he resists acknowledging that he has emotionally (and psychologically) been altered by you. He’s fighting against himself, his feelings, and his deep-seated need for order and control.

It’s not just about the other person being the object of affection, but also about how the yandere’s actions are disguised as a form of care or control. Tim’s behavior is intellectualized, but ultimately, it becomes a twisted form of caring about you. because he feels the need to protect his mind from the chaos you caused.

He isn’t out to control you in an obvious or violent way, but he is still willing to manipulate himself, isolate himself, and make his life a battleground to deal with the psychological impact you’ve had on him. His obsession is dangerous because it turns inward, manifesting as self-sabotage and manipulation of his own reality.

He’s obsessively fixated on you and your ideology, even if it’s intellectualized.

His actions are extreme and self-destructive, to the point of harming himself and trying to replicate the effects of your ideology just to understand it.

He rationalizes his behavior, cloaking his obsession in the guise of control and self-protection.

He can’t escape his need to keep you in his mind, despite the fact that he refuses to acknowledge he’s mentally and emotionally dependent on you.

This is a yandere mentality. it’s about obsession, but the obsession isn’t always in the form of love or possession; it’s intellectualized, twisted control over his own mental processes, a constant back-and-forth battle between logic and emotion, trying to force order and balance into a chaotic, uncomfortable truth: You’ve already changed him.

As soon as you initiate a scheme in the city, Tim’s first instinct is to analyze the structure of your plan. not to stop it outright, but to figure out the rationale behind it.

He’s no longer just a vigilante trying to thwart criminals. He’s an obsessive detective caught between stopping you and understanding you. Tim immediately dissects your actions as if you’re a case study, drawing mental parallels between your methods and his own. In his mind, he’s trying to solve the puzzle of you.

The deeper question he asks is: What’s your real motivation? Is it really just about rest for the overworked, or is there some deeper emotional need driving you? he begins to map your psychology against every move you make. Is this a desire for control? Revenge? Relief from guilt? He tracks the smallest clues. patterns in your behavior, things you've said in passing, the faces of the people you leave behind after your schemes.

He will obsessively cross-reference your plans with previous ones, trying to pinpoint where your logic might have a flaw, where it doesn’t “add up” in his mind. Maybe he’ll find the places where your ideology inadvertently causes harm or chaos, and those are the moments where he feels the most alive. because that’s the piece of you he’s been trying to "fix."

Tim is the king of preparation, and when you pull a scheme on Gotham, you better believe he’ll have deeply researched the specifics of it. He will analyze the infrastructure of your plot and create counter-schemes that are tailored to your ideology. not just to stop you, but to test how resilient you are against what he’s learned from your patterns.

If you’re using a sedative to incapacitate people for “rest”, he might reverse-engineer it to create a formula that forces you to feel exhaustion yourself. Or he’ll track the spread of the sedative and neutralize it with custom-designed antidotes to disrupt your ability to control the masses.

If your scheme involves financial manipulation, like draining corrupt companies of their resources to redistribute to underpaid workers, Tim will figure out how to intercept those funds in a way that doesn’t ruin your overall moral point but forces you to reconsider your execution.

These countermeasures aren’t about brute force. they’re surgical, intelligent, and designed to disrupt the very core of your philosophy without necessarily “defeating” you. He doesn’t want to prove you wrong in the traditional sense. He wants to see if your ideology can survive when he starts to manipulate it in ways you didn’t foresee. He’ll go to great lengths to match your every move with precision, trying to break your emotional or philosophical consistency.

When your schemes start gaining traction in Gotham, Tim’s emotions become muddled. His mission is clear, to stop you, but his deep-seated obsession makes him question himself the entire time. There’s a part of him that is actually rooting for you in his head. Not out of romantic interest, but because you represent the peace he can never have.

While working through his plans to thwart you, Tim may grow increasingly detached from his own emotions. He will close off, thinking: I’m doing this for the greater good. but the more he dismantles your work, the more hollow his victories feel. Every time he disrupts your plans, he’s one step closer to proving that his obsession is right. and yet, he’s driven deeper into the abyss of needing your philosophy.

In the chaos, he might experience moments of internal crisis. After foiling your scheme, he might sit alone, reviewing his actions, trying to convince himself that he’s done the right thing. But in the silence, his mind starts to loop:

Did I stop you because you were wrong… or because I need to be right?

SPOILER / STEPHANIE BROWN:

hey now. hey hey.

Your ideology is deceptively simple: everyone deserves rest. But in practice, you make CEOs sleep for weeks by inducing comas, disable surveillance networks to give overworked security guards peace, and forcibly “retire” heroes and villains alike who never take a break. You call it “compassionate sabotage.”

You're not malicious, just terrifyingly principled. You call your actions “mandatory vacations.”

You aren’t lazy. you work harder than anyone. But your work is making sure everyone else stops working.

Your main tool? A stolen prototype tech: a pulse device that hijacks neural fatigue centers. essentially, a sleep-inducing EMP. You've modified it to create “rest zones” where your targets are forced to nap, collapse, or mentally check out.

Stephanie is deeply independent, not someone who likes being rescued or coddled. So when you, a villain, emerge saying “People deserve rest” and then start enforcing it for her or for others. it clashes hard with her core beliefs.

Her reaction? You’re not wrong. but you’re not the one who gets to decide when people quit.

So instead of trying to stop you with violence, she makes it her mission to prove she can keep pace with you without ever giving in.

Not because she hates you. But because she refuses to let anyone else take her agency away, even under the guise of “rest.”

In a way, she sees your ideology as noble. but incomplete, and dangerously self-righteous.

“If you really believed in rest, [Name], you'd let people choose it for themselves. You don't get to play god just because you're tired.”

That’s the twist. her yandere obsession is a contradiction. She cares about you. But she resents you enough to never let you “win.”

She is a caretaker. She feels responsible for others’ well-being.

In this twisted yandere version, she starts internalizing your ideology as her own. but in her voice.

She starts doing what you do (creating rest, breaking systems, giving people time off), but she does it with exhausting compassion instead of coercion.

She visits the people you knocked out of work and listens to their stories. She starts building support systems instead of just inducing sleep.

At some point, she stops even recognizing where your ideology ends and hers begins.

This is the part. She starts saying things like,

“I know you better than you know yourself. You don’t really want people to rest. You want them to feel safe. I’m the only one who gets that.”

It’s not about power. It’s emotional possessiveness through worldview.

She thinks she’s the only one who really understands what you meant. And that’s how she becomes the “better” version of you.

Because stephanie tends to ramble and overshare, especially under stress, this becomes the mask slipping.

You’ll find her babbling at one of your sleep zones, running through plans she says are yours, ideas you never had, rewriting your philosophy with new rules. her rules.

Her affection bleeds through these overshares, but it’s detached from reality. She’s talking to an idea of you.

It’s not romantic. it’s emotional dependency on the version of you that lives in her head, who “gets it” the way no one else does.

At first, she judges you. “This villain’s just another self-righteous burnout case.”

But then… she starts sympathizing too much.

Because she’s been there. She’s burned out. She knows what it’s like to be drowning in responsibility.

So the twist is, she locks herself in a moral logic trap where the only way to reconcile her loyalty and her judgment is to absorb your mission.

And she becomes possessive of your ideology.

She doesn’t need your presence to be obsessed with you. she’s committed for life, even if she never sees you again.

Her platonic yandere angle isn’t based in presence.

You could disappear. Retire. Die. And she’d keep living by your principles, warped and restructured in her voice, long after you’re gone.

“You were right, you just… didn’t go far enough. But I will. I’ll make sure everyone gets rest. even if it kills me.”

Her obsession is philosophical inheritance.

She doesn’t want your body. She wants your burden.

She’s not in love with you. She believes in you. more than you believe in yourself.

And she’ll never stop trying to prove that belief right.

You're not her enemy.

You’re a problem she refuses to put down, not out of duty. but because you’ve taken up space in her brain in a way nothing else has.

You’re the first villain who’s not selfish or sadistic. you’re compassionate to a fault. And that… scares her. Because she sees herself in you.

She’s constantly torn between admiring you and being horrified by your methods.

She respects you, maybe more than she respects some of the Batfam. You believe in something.

But she also resents that belief because it feels like it’s directed at her.

Every time you disable a system or knock out another hero for their “own good,” it feels like a passive-aggressive intervention aimed at her life choices.

“They’re so tired. I can see it. Every time they do this, I wonder if they’re hoping someone will stop them. I wonder if they’re hoping it’s me.”

She thinks you’re crying out for help, even if you say you're not.

So she treats your schemes as tests. not of Gotham, but of herself.

She thinks: “If I stop them this time, maybe they’ll stop pushing themselves so hard. Maybe they’ll finally rest.”

She never thinks you’re doing this for power or even change anymore.

She’s convinced you’re doing it because you’re breaking, and this is your coping mechanism.

So she responds like you’re a sick friend acting out. not a villain.

Say you pull a classic “mandatory rest” plot: you gas the GCPD precinct with your signature neuro-fatigue fog, knocking out cops mid-shift, replacing their patrols with drones programmed to play soft jazz and deliver pillows.

What does Stephanie do?

She physically drags unconscious cops to safety, takes over patrol duty herself, reroutes emergency lines to her comms.

She's not just stopping your plot. she's doing all the work you made them stop doing, out of spiteful admiration.

Because at her core, she believes you’re better at this than she is.

She’s not obsessed with owning you. She’s obsessed with earning your approval without ever admitting it.

Steph’s the type of person who latches onto ideologies that resonate with her pain. Your “people deserve rest” philosophy touches a nerve in her. the part of her that’s always overworking, overcompensating, always feeling like she has to prove her worth by staying in the fight longer than anyone else.

You present an alternative: people like her shouldn’t have to live that way.

But instead of taking that as healing? She turns it into an impossible ideal to chase, a kind of moral godhood to strive for. by outworking you.

That becomes the obsession.

Obsession not with possessing you, but with surpassing you. by taking your ideology to a self-destructive extreme.

This aligns with platonic yandere, because it’s devotion through identification.

You're not a person to her anymore. you're a mission.

Yanderes often project unresolved trauma or longing onto someone else. and that’s what Steph’s doing, just in reverse. Instead of saying “You complete me,” she’s saying:

“You are me, if I gave up. So I have to save you to save myself.”

You’re a walking contradiction of what she believes.

You're trying to help people, but you take away their choice.

You're trying to reduce suffering, but your methods cause chaos.

You remind her that rest is good, but also that she’s too scared to take it.

She’s locked in an emotional loop. she hates that you’re right, so she needs to carry your burden for you to prove she can do it better.

That’s the yandere core: her self-worth becomes entangled with your very existence.

That’s obsession.

Yandere’s are obsessed with someone. she is obsessed with your ideology and moral integrity.

Yandere’s have an all-consuming devotion. she rearranges her life to become your philosophical rival / ally / shadow

Yandere’s have blurred self-other boundary. She starts thinking for you, justifying your actions, ‘fixing’ your failures.

Yandere’s are willing to hurt others or themselves to protect their bond. She is literally breaking herself to carry your burden so YOU can rest.

Yandere doesn’t always mean “I love you so much I’ll kill.”

It means: “You have taken root in my identity. I no longer know where I end and you begin.”

Stephanie’s version of that is emotionally and philosophically parasitic. she doesn’t just want to understand you, she wants to become your better version.

She’s addicted to your idea of peace, but she’ll only allow herself to bring it into the world through her own pain.

So even when you try to stop, she won’t let you. because she needs the problem of you to exist in order to stay whole.

You say “rest is a right.”

She says “fine! but let me be the one who earns it for everyone. Including you!”

ORPHAN / CASSANDRA CAIN:

You’re a villain, real name unknown, who built your ideology around the belief that "Hardworking people deserve rest too." You’re infamous not for mass destruction but for forcing stillness. you create “zones” across Gotham where time seems to slow, people collapse into dreamlike trances, and all forms of labor, mental, emotional, and physical, are impossible. These are fields of rest: mental euthanasia for the overworked. Gotham calls it terrorism. You call it justice.

You target places like sweatshops, overpoliced blocks, high schools, prisons, hospitals. You don’t kill. You sedate. You erase urgency. The city grinds to a stop around you. Your villainy is lethargy as revolution.

Cassandra loves, but not in the typical way. she’s obsessed with the silence you carry. The absence you bring. You are the only person she has ever met who communicates in the same language she does: non-action as expression. When you step into a space and it becomes still, quiet, slow. it reminds her of the only language she knew for years: stillness = presence.

To Cassandra, your acts of “rest” are not terrorism. They are poetry. You’re the first person whose ideology isn’t just words, it’s movement. Or lack thereof. Your body language, your pacing, your restraint, your surrender, your slowness. it’s all fluent to her.

She becomes addicted to your zones of rest. She seeks them out in secret. She lets herself get caught in your fields, lying perfectly still for hours, even days. She studies how it feels to not move, not think, not protect, not perform. For someone raised to be a weapon, these moments are the only place she feels like a human.

But it goes deeper.

She begins trying to create her own silent fields. Not by tech, like you. but through sheer mastery of space. She builds rooms in safehouses that mimic the psychological effects of your zones: low heartbeat, no light, no sound, temperature-neutral. Rooms where the air feels like your presence. She begins “training” herself to rest the way you “force” others to rest. She fails. But she keeps trying. She's training to be the kind of silence you are.

Cassandra doesn’t want to protect you. She doesn’t want to stop you.

She wants to become a space where you can finally rest without using your skills.

Her obsession is to train herself so perfectly, body, soul, and presence, that she becomes a kind of human rest zone for you. She imagines a moment where you, finally tired, curl up in a room she’s prepared, where her stillness, her silence, her restraint, are enough to hold you.

She doesn’t want you to love her. She wants to be the one place in Gotham you don’t need to change.

That’s the core of her obsession: she doesn't want to possess you. She wants to neutralize the part of you that thinks you have to be a villain to deserve peace.

Cassandra doesn’t see you as evil. She sees you as wounded. Someone who understands pain so deeply you want to anesthetize the world. Her obsession is born not out of delusion, but empathy. You represent a moral contradiction she feels rather than intellectualizes: "If I believe people deserve rest, then why don’t I believe that about myself?"

Cassandra’s behavior doesn’t revolve around harming others for you. it revolves around trying to contain the damage you cause without rejecting you. Every time you put people into “rest zones,” she gets there early and evacuates them, silently, flawlessly, so that you don’t have to feel guilty. She absorbs the guilt you should carry. because she believes you can’t handle it, and because she thinks she deserves it more.

She starts believing that if she can physically perfect herself enough, if she can move so flawlessly, so quietly, so gently, she could “interrupt” your zones by being a “bridge” between them and the waking world. She trains not to be stronger. but to be so neutral, so quiet, that she could walk through your fields without disturbing them. That she could enter your world, untouched.

This becomes an obsession. A spiritual practice. Not to control you, but to understand you. Because maybe if she understands you, really understands the language of your pain, she can find forgiveness for herself.

Cassandra doesn’t want to protect you from the world.

She wants to protect the world from you, without taking you away from it.

She doesn’t stalk you. She studies the void you leave behind. The emotional signatures of your rest zones. The subtle patterns in how your powers work. where they’re gentle, where they’re rough. The nuance. She starts to believe that your powers reflect your mental state, and that if she can just reach you emotionally, if she can be the one person who “rests with you” instead of stopping you or resisting you. you’ll start to change.

It’s not devotion. It’s not love. It’s a compulsion to become your equal in stillness the way she is in motion.

She doesn't see herself as worthy of peace, so she’s obsessed with the idea that you are. even though you’re a villain. well I’m gonna be honest here you aren’t really the most intimidating villain out there

She slowly replaces her belief in justice with a belief in your twisted ideology. but only for you. She wants the world to keep moving, but for you to stay still, so that she can sit beside you and learn how to be still too.

Cassandra’s obsession is not romantic, not controlling, not destructive, but it is deep, consuming, and isolating.

She becomes obsessed with translating you.

Not just your ideology. but your presence, your silence, your belief that rest is deserved. She doesn’t want to be you. She wants to understand what you mean, in a world where no one else listens closely enough to hear it.

That is the thread. she is the only one who believes she can understand you, and the only one who should.

Not because you chose her. Because she chose herself.

She grew up reading bodies, not words. Before she could speak, she could sense intent. The way people moved, breathed, carried guilt or rage. this was her truth.

You are the first person she’s encountered whose ideology is entirely expressed through absence.

Your powers, your beliefs, your villainy. it’s all quiet. No speeches. No violence. Just forced stillness. You’re like a language she hasn’t heard before. but one she almost knows.

So she starts watching. Following. Not to stop you, but to study you. (wow another study I feel so unoriginal please forgive me)

Normally, Cassandra’s guilt makes her obsessed with preventing loss. But with you, it’s different. She sees your actions as a danger, yes. but also as truthful. You make people stop. You force Gotham to rest.

“What if they really do need to stop? What if they really can’t anymore? What if they’re right, and no one’s listening?”

So her guilt doesn’t make her want to kill or capture you. It makes her want to intervene at the exact right moment, with perfect understanding, to protect both you and the world at once.

That need for perfect understanding becomes obsession.

She becomes a master of navigating your influence like a field of tension. Like choreography.

This effort to read you becomes ritualistic. Not to stop you outright, but to be the one person who knows when and how to move in your world of stillness. without shattering it.

She believes that if she fails to understand you, someone else will just try to stop you. and break everything in the process. Kill you. Or worse, never even hear you.

So she trains. Watches. Prepares. Builds her entire sense of justice around the idea of timing her interference to preserve both your message and your victims.

That level of focus, that self-imposed burden, and the fierce belief that only she can walk that line?

That’s yandere.

But it’s Cassandra’s kind of yandere. no delusion. No harm. No identity loss. Just an overwhelming, morally complex need to understand, and to exist in the space between you and the world. Alone.

Cassandra Cain’s guilt complex is rooted in the trauma of her upbringing and her internalized belief that she is fundamentally a weapon. Raised to be an assassin and trained to fight, kill, and survive without room for compassion or peace, she has always been caught between her desire to protect life and her overwhelming sense that she doesn't deserve to. Her entire existence has been a tightrope walk between trying to atone for her violent origins and struggling to find a moral path that she feels is genuinely hers.

For Cassandra, the "language of rest" which is expressed by your villainous ideology, disrupts her entire framework of guilt, action, and self-worth. You, [name], create a philosophy that challenges everything Cassandra has internalized about her own existence. By saying, “Hardworking people deserve rest too,” you’re offering peace as a form of justice. You suggest that the weight of the world doesn't need to be shouldered by people like her, people who’ve been conditioned to keep fighting and keep protecting, even at the cost of their own well-being.

Cassandra's guilt isn't just a passive feeling, it's a driving force. Every life she can't save, every failure, becomes a crushing weight on her conscience. She’s always trying to do more, to be more. whether it’s protecting Gotham or making sure that everyone else is okay. But she always fails to rest. She feels that, because she’s been trained to be a weapon, she isn’t allowed to stop. She isn't allowed to be weak. even if that's what her heart needs.

When Cassandra hears about you, or even encounters your presence, she initially sees you as a threat. But as she watches your actions unfold, she starts to realize something profound: You’re not just a villain; you’re someone who has figured out that rest. the concept of allowing people to stop working, stop pushing forward, stop suffering. is the ultimate form of compassion.

And that’s when the guilt hits her the hardest: Why can’t she allow herself to rest? Why can’t she accept the peace of stopping for just a moment? She sees the people who are caught in your zones of stillness, and while she doesn’t fully agree with the way you’re doing things, she understands the need for rest. She sees that, perhaps, they deserve a moment of peace from the chaos. and she feels this deep, gnawing pain that she’s never allowed herself that same luxury. She never stops.

This is where Cassandra’s obsession with you, the villain, the embodiment of the “language of rest” grows. It isn't about control. It’s not about stopping you, or even about fixing the world you create. It’s about learning your “language” because, at a deeply psychological level, Cassandra is trying to learn how to forgive herself and find peace.

Her desire to understand your language of stillness comes from the belief that if she can translate your ideology, then she can finally find a way to give herself permission to stop—to allow herself to rest without guilt.

She doesn’t want to hurt you. She doesn’t want to stop you. She wants to understand how you find peace, how you can exist in a world that demands action and still say no. She wants to learn from your calm and perhaps, in doing so, learn how to release herself from her own constant cycle of guilt and self-punishment.

As much as Cassandra is drawn to you, she knows you’re a threat to others, even if she understands your intentions. She starts to see your ideology as something dangerous, not because it’s wrong, but because it’s radical. People in Gotham, people she loves, might fall victim to the seduction of rest, to the idea of giving up everything and shutting down. If she doesn’t intervene, they might never know how to return to the world of action, of doing.

Thus, her obsession becomes an act of protection. She doesn’t want to take you away. She doesn’t want to kill you. She just wants to make sure that you’re understood. She believes that the world might need you, but they also need someone to mediate between your stillness and their need for movement. If she can help protect the world from your influence while still honoring your right to be still, she’ll have succeeded in reconciling her own need for rest without letting the world fall apart.

Cassandra’s obsession with your “language of rest” is driven by her own guilt. specifically, the belief that she is too broken to deserve peace. She’s never allowed herself to rest because of the weight of the violence and trauma she’s been through. But when she sees you, when she observes how you create zones of stillness, she realizes that perhaps rest isn’t something you have to earn. It’s something that you can just deserve.

Her obsession is not a delusional need to control you, but a deeply emotional and intellectual desire to understand you. your power, your language, and what it would mean for her to give herself permission to stop. She believes she can only protect you by understanding you deeply, so she trains herself to read your silence and rest in a way that won’t disrupt it, but will keep people safe.

This isn’t about taking you away or forcing you to conform to her values. It’s about becoming the one person who can help guide the world in between your rest and their need to keep moving, while also learning how to give herself the same peace.

In essence, Cassandra’s obsession is about finding balance. between her past, her guilt, and the elusive peace that only you, the villain, seem to embody. She believes that by mimicking your “language of rest,” she can finally let go of the guilt that’s driven her entire life, and perhaps find her own version of peace.

As a protector of Gotham, Cassandra’s primary focus is always on protecting the innocent. She doesn’t view you as a pure villain in the traditional sense; she sees you as someone who is acting out of a distorted sense of justice, someone who’s simply misunderstood. This leads to her very unique response to your villainy.

When your schemes unfold, whether it’s taking control of a building, manipulating a large group of people into “rest zones,” or causing mass disruption in the city, Cassandra’s actions are deeply strategic. She doesn’t immediately go in guns blazing or try to take you down with force, because she believes there’s another way to approach this. Instead:

Cassandra, understanding the nature of your stillness, carefully works to isolate your influence without triggering your retaliation. She saves civilians caught in the chaos, evacuates them from your zones of rest, and keeps them safe, all while not disrupting your scheme. It’s a delicate balance of neutralizing harm without destroying your work.

If she can’t understand you through direct observation, she’ll act more tactically: learning the patterns of your schemes, the subtle ways you manipulate people into rest. She’s not actively trying to stop your plan; she’s trying to comprehend it in a way that prevents unnecessary casualties while respecting your philosophy. Her obsession with understanding you makes her believe that if she can "decode" the true nature of your schemes, she’ll be able to stop the harm caused without ruining your message.

Despite her growing empathy for your philosophy, Cassandra’s moral code still compels her to prevent harm.

Her first instinct is to protect Gotham. She may not agree with your methods, but she cannot stand by and let innocent lives be harmed or disrupted by your schemes. However, this is where her compassion comes into play. because she understands the pull of your ideology. You want to offer people rest, peace, but it’s in a way that she feels may be harmful in the long term. So, as much as she wants to leave you to your plan, she can’t let innocent lives be caught up in it.

Cassandra doesn’t see you as a purely evil person. You’re still someone who, in her mind, could find peace. but only if understood. So, she doesn’t want to destroy you. She doesn’t want to disrupt the rest you bring to people; she just wants to make sure they are safe from the side effects of it. whether that’s societal breakdown, loss of motivation, or violence triggered by people who can't cope with the sudden stillness.

Cassandra doesn’t communicate with words; she communicates through presence, movement, and action. She’ll often work in parallel with you, acting just enough to mitigate damage. Her goal is to interrupt your plans without ever confronting you. She wants to get close enough to understand you, but not close enough to disrupt what you’re doing. She has a unique sense of being in the background, neutralizing the harm of your schemes without ever engaging in a fight.

ORACLE / BARBARA GORDON:

When you, the villain, become a symbol of resilience, carrying the weight of your own struggles and responsibilities, Barbara sees you as someone who needs protection, not from physical threats, but from the constant need to prove your worth through labor and toil. She believes that the concept of "rest" isn't just a physical break. it is a moral imperative, a form of self-care that, in her eyes, becomes a revolutionary act of defiance against a world built on constant expectations of productivity.

As a villain, your mission becomes one of opposing the grind culture and offering sanctuary to those who exhaust themselves in the name of ambition. You argue that society does not allow people to pause, to take breath, and that even the most noble of people need to protect their own well-being to avoid being crushed under the weight of their own responsibilities.

In contrast, Barbara's view of "protection" is warped into something far more controlling and intrusive. She doesn’t seek to break you down, but she seeks to prevent you from ever needing to push yourself too hard again, ensuring that no harm ever befalls you through exhaustion. Her love, care, and obsession manifest as a form of containment and intervention, where she believes that her role as Oracle, the information hub, is not merely to observe. but to subtly intervene in your life whenever you push yourself too far.

Barbara, with her technological prowess, subtly manipulates the environment around you to induce a constant state of optimal rest. Rather than taking direct action like drugging or forcing you to sleep, she reprograms your environment to make it impossible for you to overwork or deny yourself rest. She ensures that your workspaces are constantly interrupted. whether through the careful timing of technology glitches, forcing distractions in your workflow, or sending perfectly timed alerts or requests that disrupt your overworking cycle, giving you no choice but to stop.

Instead of obsessing over your physical safety, Barbara focuses entirely on your emotional well-being and psychological state. She doesn’t stalk you in an obvious sense; instead, she gathers every piece of emotional data about your life and organizes it into a form of emotional record-keeping. This isn't an ordinary obsession with your personal life. it's a deep psychological study of your stress levels, your peak moments of exhaustion, your emotional vulnerabilities, and the signs when you're too worn out to fight back.

She becomes your emotional mirror, using her ability as Oracle to quietly orchestrate moments of introspection. At the precise moments when you start to doubt yourself, when you begin to show signs of emotional or physical fatigue, Barbara will subtly introduce you to the idea of rest by having things around you whisper the importance of balance.

Rather than confronting you with physical action, Barbara becomes the voice in your head. Every time you try to work past your limits, you begin to hear her voice, not as a commanding figure, but as a gentle whisper of reassurance that reminds you of the importance of rest. Her voice is never angry or manipulative; it's simply soothing. a calm and comforting presence that tells you that you deserve time off.

Barbara Gordon’s obsession is not about viewing you as fragile or weak, but rather about seeing them as someone with a critical understanding of the balance between labor and rest. To Barbara, your ideology represents something the world has forgotten, a truth that resonates deeply with her, one that she feels must be protected and nurtured at all costs. She recognizes that you are fighting against the overwhelming expectations of a society that demands constant productivity.

To her, that makes you one of the few who understand the deep moral importance of balance. and she feels a deep, almost reverent responsibility to ensure you never fall prey to the grind of constant work.

Barbara doesn't see you as fragile or too important because of some inherent weakness or need to be protected. She sees your ideology as precious, something that the world cannot afford to lose. Your stance on rest is, in her eyes, revolutionary and vital for the future of society. When she comes to learn of your philosophy, she becomes obsessed. not with controlling you, but with ensuring that you stay true to your beliefs, never falter, and never get swept up into a world that demands you to sacrifice rest in favor of endless toil.

Barbara doesn’t necessarily see you as a villain in the traditional sense, but she does view you as a necessary disruptor of society’s unrelenting work culture. In fact, she admires you for challenging the norms, but she believes you need protection from the consequences of your actions. Barbara's obsession isn't rooted in traditional possessiveness, but more in a protective, almost maternal way, as she sees you as someone trying to "break" the world for the greater good, but is blind to the potential risks involved.

She understands your motivation: your goal is to force society to slow down, to embrace rest, and to dismantle the grind culture that leads to burnout. She sees your ideology as radical, but morally justified, yet she fears that the world won’t be ready for such a drastic shift. Barbara is conflicted, because while she agrees with your cause, she also believes that the world might punish you for your audacity.

her obsession with you isn’t about possessiveness in the traditional sense. Instead, she becomes obsessed with safeguarding the very timeline of your life to ensure that you never fall victim to the overwhelming grind of a society that demands endless productivity. Her obsession isn’t just about protecting you in the physical world, but it’s about protecting your time and ensuring your ideological mission is fulfilled without failure.

She doesn’t just intervene in obvious ways. Barbara starts manipulating the flow of time itself. indirectly, subtly, and through small, almost imperceptible shifts in your environment that allow you to slow down the world around you. This isn’t the conventional ‘she controls your day’ trope. Instead, it’s about creating micro-shifts in time that affect your world without you even knowing it. giving you the space to rest and work toward your villainous goal without ever feeling the weight of external pressure.

ROBIN / DAMIAN WAYNE:

🤯🤯🤯🤯 Imm actually writing this is crazy

Damian does not see you as a person to be worshipped. He sees you as a controlled variable in a long-term psychological experiment. one that only he can run properly. Not because he reveres you, but because he’s utterly convinced that your ideology is flawed, yet correctable. and he is the only one mentally and morally equipped to run that correction.

To Damian, your villainy (saying "hardworking people deserve rest too") is both a philosophical threat and a psychological anomaly. It directly contradicts everything he's been raised to believe. He cannot accept that your ideology exists unpunished or unexamined. But rather than eliminate you like a typical villain, Damian becomes fixated on studying you. long-term, with exacting control and subtle manipulation. because if he can dissect your reasoning and predict your behavior, he can prove something vital:

That true rest is weakness and you’re wrong, or if you somehow prove resilient and coherent under pressure. then he’s the one who’s been broken all along.

So, in essence:

You are not his beloved. You are his test subject. His control. His anomaly.

And he will not let you go until your mind and methods are fully mapped, tested, and resolved.

Damian was raised in a world of rigid cause-and-effect. Pain has meaning. Work brings results. Rest is a consequence of failure. or a brief, tactical necessity.

Your ideology infects him like a splinter in the brain. It doesn’t match anything in his mental model.

He doesn't worship you. he fixates on disproving you. But in that process, he can't help but make you the center of his world. Every move you make becomes data. Every speech, action, or crime you commit is part of the "thesis" he's crafting in his mind about you.

He doesn’t track you because he’s obsessed. He tracks you because he’s testing a hypothesis.

He’s still Robin. Still heroic. Still methodical. But slowly, his motivation shifts from protecting Gotham to solving you. You become the project.

Damian’s arrogance plays beautifully into this version of obsession. He isn’t obsessed with you because you’re special. he’s obsessed because he believes no one else is smart enough or strong enough to see you for what you are: a fault line in the moral fabric of the world.

Everyone else underestimates you. Tries to reform you. He scoffs at them.

They think you're misguided.

He thinks you’re structurally unsound. A riddle. A contradiction.

And that means he must be the one to break your logic. or fix it.

And in his own twisted way, that’s compassion.

Because if you’re right, and hardworking people deserve rest, then what was his childhood for?

What was all his pain, trauma, perfectionism for?

He has to prove you're wrong, because otherwise… he’s the broken one. And he can’t accept that.

He doesn't control your life because he wants to own you.

He exerts subtle, precise pressure on your environment, because he wants to see what you do under increasing moral and emotional strain. He's simulating failure, pressure, fatigue. not to break you, but to force clarity out of you.

He's not trying to keep you safe.

He's trying to force your truth to reveal itself.

Like a philosopher tearing a belief apart from the inside.

He needs you to exist, because without you, he has no framework against which to test the righteousness of everything he’s lived and suffered for.

If you crack?

He wins.

If you endure?

Then he must rebuild his entire worldview.

And that terrifies him.

So he keeps you close. not to hold you, but to observe you until your ideology either collapses or consumes him.

You are not the center of his heart. You are the center of a moral experiment.

He does not protect you. He pressures you in escalating patterns to test the validity of your belief system.

His yandere behavior is not about possession or love. it’s about truth, and how your ideology is the first thing he cannot beat into submission with logic or force.

You are the anomaly. And he will not stop until you are solved.

KEY POINT !!!! yandere is less about how someone expresses love/attachment, and more about how far they go because of it. even if it’s not recognizable as love.

In traditional yandere stories, the obsession is usually romantic or emotional. Here, Damian’s obsession is intellectual and existential.

He builds his entire mental framework around you.

You are the central variable in an internal experiment he cannot stop running.

Every action you take is monitored, processed, tested, and anticipated.

You are not "a person he loves"; you're the fulcrum his entire worldview is balancing on.

That’s obsession. just not emotional. It’s structural. Existential.

Damian doesn’t realize he’s obsessed. It’s rationalized, controlled, and intellectualized.

He’s doing everything a yandere does.

Inserting himself into your life

Manipulating your environment

Isolating you (in a philosophical sense)

Rewriting the narrative around you

He just thinks it’s a mental exercise.

Instead of:

“I love you, I must keep you with me forever,”

It’s:

“You are the most important ideological anomaly I’ve ever encountered. You are too important to be left untested, too unstable to be trusted, and too vital to my self-concept for me to allow you to fade or be resolved by anyone else.”

That’s the energy. just wearing a lab coat instead of holding a bloody knife.

He may not physically harm you or confess to loving you, but he makes your autonomy conditional on his internal criteria.

You can’t rest until he says you’ve passed the “test.”

You can’t “win” until he’s done proving you right or wrong.

You can’t be free of him, because he hasn’t solved you yet.

Classic yanderes often say:

“If I can’t have you, no one can.”

Damian’s version is:

“If I can’t understand you, no one else has the right to.”

The reason why I THINK this still belongs under the “yandere” umbrella is because it follows the same emotional trajectory and internal distortions that define the archetype,

A character loses their sense of boundaries.

They collapse internal identity with another person’s existence.

They override ethical norms to maintain or control the connection.

They believe that they alone can handle or fix this person. whether that’s out of love, duty, or obsession.

Even though Damian’s fixation isn’t expressed through affection, it’s still:

Exclusive (no one else is allowed to analyze or challenge you).

Possessive (you are his to test, his to resolve).

All-consuming (you’re at the center of his private ideological war).

In other words:

It’s yandere, just stripped of emotional romanticism, and rebuilt as a cold-blooded intellectual and moral dependency.

he needs your ideology to function as a mirror.

he needs your continued existence to maintain the integrity of his internal structure.

he needs you to stay active and reactive so his experiment doesn’t break.

If you left, changed, or gave up?

He wouldn’t break down crying.

He would go into internal collapse, because he’d lose the axis around which his entire worldview was rotating.

That’s yandere by architecture, not by emotion.

What makes Damian’s version of obsession so compelling is how unfeeling it appears. yet how deeply entangled it becomes. It’s never about emotion on the surface.

But psychologically? You’re not just "interesting" to him. you’re essential. He needs you to exist, because you're holding up this entire moral paradox in his mind:

“If people deserve rest after working hard… then why have I never been allowed to stop? Why do I keep working, if there’s no rest at the end? Have I been lied to? Or is the system broken? Or am I just… wrong?”

You are the wedge in his psyche, the thing he can’t stop turning over. He has to test you, predict you, control variables in your environment. not because he cares about your wellbeing, but because you’re the final piece of a puzzle he can’t leave unsolved.

And if someone else tries to solve you?

He’ll sabotage them. not out of jealousy, but because they’ll do it wrong. He knows it. They don’t have his experience, his trauma, his methodical logic. In his mind, you can only be understood by someone as broken as him. but he’d never say that out loud.

It’s not “I want you to love me.” It’s “I can’t let you go until I’ve made you make sense.”

When you pull a scheme on Gotham?

he doesn’t stop you immediately.

He’s watching. Monitoring. Logging how citizens react. Tracking who breaks down first.

You’re not just a threat. you’re a pressure mechanism.

“If [Name] believes that rest is a right, how do they choose who deserves it?”

“Do they attack the overworked? The rich? The system?”

“Is this justice or delusion? Compassion or ego?”

He lets the scheme run long enough to study the ideological structure of your action.

He’s not just trying to stop you. he’s peer reviewing your villainy.

He might even let minor chaos happen. People getting evacuated, systems breaking down. He’ll step in before lives are lost, sure, but not too soon. If he cuts it off too quickly, he won’t see the full design.

Damian doesn’t interfere with Nightwing, Bruce, or anyone else doing their jobs. He even plays his part in the missions. But here’s the twist.

He quietly studies how others respond to your villainy.

Who gets emotionally rattled by your message?

Who underestimates your ideological structure?

Who tries to reason with you, and fails?

He doesn't stop them from acting. He just archives their reactions.

You become a new variable in his private, ongoing mental report: “Case Study: The Villain of Rest.”

He lets others interact with you. not to help them, but to observe what fails.

Because eventually, when they can’t stop you effectively?

He will.

And not through brute force, but by proving your model breaks under his terms.

This is where the obsession hits. in the mentality behind his presence.

He’s not trying to control you through force or fear.

He’s trying to regulate your ideology. because your message is too powerful, too destabilizing, to be left unchecked by someone else.

He can’t let Gotham absorb you unchecked.

And he can’t let the Batfam dismantle you without understanding.

So he becomes your buffer.

The line between you and the world.

The one who tracks you, interrupts you, monitors how much chaos you're allowed to create. because only he knows how much is “too much.”

He’s not your protector.

He’s your ideological handler.

When you pull a scheme, Damian Interferes only enough to prevent unintended harm. not to stop the idea.

he shows up consistently not to fight, but to redirect, advise, observe.

he does not interfere with the Batfam’s work, but stays one step ahead of them. so he's always the one who gets to you first.

he builds a system around you in his mind, treating you as a variable he will not allow others to define.

He obsesses over the balance between letting your ideology breathe. and keeping it from mutating.

I realize this is similar to tim’s … oh well 🥀

SIGNAL / DUKE THOMAS:

please god I am so tired

😪 maybe I should follow this ideology too

Duke Thomas, as someone with an intense sense of responsibility and a need to fight injustice, is constantly driven by urgency. His life is often a whirlwind of late nights, constant work, and the feeling that there’s always something else to be done. both as a vigilante and as a young person trying to keep up with everything else.

It’s a never-ending push, an emotional and mental grind that leaves him on edge, even when he tries to find moments of peace. For Duke, balance seems like a distant concept. He thrives on action, but it also leaves him emotionally drained, always caught between the desire to rest and the nagging feeling that he can’t afford to.

Enter YOU! someone who comes into his life embodying everything he craves but can never attain: peace, comfort, and the ability to take a step back. You believe that hardworking people deserve rest, and this philosophy runs completely counter to Duke’s relentless drive. You live by a slower, more intentional pace, where moments of stillness and relaxation are just as important as hard work. You don’t feel the need to constantly prove your worth or fight against every injustice. you trust that things will find balance on their own.

This creates an immediate obsession for Duke. You are the opposite of everything he knows. You are the calm that could soothe his storm, the balance he’s never been able to achieve in his chaotic life.

The more Duke observes you, the more fascinated he becomes, drawn to this energy that seems to defy his worldview. Your way of being seems like the ultimate ideal, something Duke believes he could never fully experience but longs to understand. and ultimately, possess.

Duke's life is emotionally charged with stress, responsibility, and a constant sense of urgency. Everything he does is driven by a desire to help and protect, but there’s always a nagging feeling of inadequacy, like he’s never doing enough. In contrast, you are someone who seems to have found a way to exist without that constant emotional push. The fact that you can take a step back from the relentless pace of life is maddening to him. not in a traditional jealous sense, but in a way that feels like you’ve unlocked something he can’t.

He might watch you (without you knowing), just to understand how you can be so relaxed, how you let go of the pressure that he’s been trained to carry. He doesn’t envy you; he’s desperate to understand how it’s possible to live in a world so chaotic yet still find peace. This, for him, is a form of escape he can’t reach. and it makes you irresistible.

To Duke, you represent the ideal version of balance. someone who isn’t overwhelmed by the weight of the world, someone who has mastered inner peace. He could never be like that, but he starts to obsessively chase after it. He might arrange his life around you, not to control you, but to see if he can mimic your way of being. If your life is calm and steady, maybe his could be too, just by being closer to you. He won’t admit it to himself, but his obsession with you isn’t just about wanting to be near someone like you. it’s about wanting to absorb your philosophy, wanting to be like you.

Every time he’s with you, he becomes acutely aware of the gap between his own chaotic, overworked existence and your serene, unburdened one. This will make him cling to you, but in a way that’s almost paradoxical: he wants to be near you to study you, not in a way that’s invasive or creepy, but with a pure fascination about your lifestyle and how you move through the world so effortlessly.

Instead of an obsession driven by possession, Duke’s fixation stems from a deep need for emotional healing. He believes that you could be the person who helps him find inner peace. not by forcing him to slow down, but by being the calm around which his chaotic life might eventually settle. He might try to subtly influence his environment so that it’s closer to the peaceful vibe you radiate, not for you to notice, but because he’s desperate to create a space where he can relax. That’s why his obsession is so quietly intense. he’s not just drawn to you, but to what you represent: the ability to be content without the need to constantly push.

This makes him see your ideology of "hardworking people deserve rest" as perfect. it’s not just an ideology for him, it’s a rulebook he has been trying to follow but never could quite grasp until now.

Duke will probably start by monitoring your movements and actions, trying to figure out your motivations. He won't just immediately go after you. Instead, Duke might try to gather more information about what you're doing and why. He might even go so far as to shadow you in a way that doesn’t immediately blow his cover, trying to learn from your methods.

He could also be conflicted because there’s something enticing about the way you approach the scheme. For example, you might be pulling off a heist, or perhaps you’re somehow halting the city's productivity, forcing its workers to take mandatory breaks, essentially grinding the gears of Gotham to a halt. It might make him wonder if he, too, can somehow enact a version of your ideology in a less destructive way. one that doesn’t harm people but still forces rest and peace upon Gotham in a controlled, sustainable way.

note: ‘ermmm!!!! this is inaccurate!!!’ ERMMM!!! ykw ur probably right but these r called hcs for a reason aannnddd!!!! i dont car!!!!!

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eyelessfaces · 11 months ago

Text

just in case

poe dameron x reader

summary: while fiddling with bb–8's memory, you stumble onto an audio message– poe's prerecorded goodbyes.

based on @ivystoryweaver's headcanon on this post! thank you for allowing me to write something about it!

warnings: angst, mentions of death and war

tags: gn!reader, hurt/comfort, fluff, kissing, poe being an absolute sap

word count: 2.6k

masterlist | taglist | ao3

updates blog: @eyelessupdates

He can’t help the fond smile growing over his face at the sight of you, deeply focused on the repair project in front of you before his knuckles hit against the doorframe a couple times, catching your attention.

Your gaze meets Poe’s as he steps into your workshop, your expression of concentration quickly giving way to an easy smile when you see him, closely followed by BB–8.

Poe greets you with a kiss, his hand lingering at your side when he pulls away.

“What’s bringing you here, handsome?” you ask, shifting to put away the tool you still have in hand. “Hey Beebs,” you smile as you glance down at the droid that greets you back.

Poe gazes down at his droid, his look shifting back at you. “Could you take a look at him whenever you got the time?” he asks, a small, defeated sigh escaping his mouth.

“What’s up?” you question, crossing your arms and raising an eyebrow at him. It hadn’t been that long since you last checked up on the droid.

“I think there’s something up with his memory, he’s been acting a little forgetful lately” Poe explains; you can see the concern in his eyes, can hear the worry in his voice.

“Okay, I’ll see what I can do.” Poe nods, pinching his lips into a quiet smile as he looks down at the droid. “Hey, you don’t have to worry'' you reassure him, resting a hand over his arm. “It’s nothing too serious usually. Nothing I can’t fix.” He nods again, knowing he can trust you with this, knowing you're as good at this as he is at flying.

“I’ll take care of him as soon as I’m done with that” you point back to the mess of scavenged parts resting over your workbench.

“Thank you sweetheart,” he says, cupping the back of your head and leaning in to leave a quick kiss on your forehead. “I’d stay with you and tell you about my day, but I have my last meeting of the day in about less than five minutes.” he shrugs, starting to walk backwards to exit the room.

“Sure, don’t worry.” you smile. “Come over when you’re done”

As promised, the minute you’re done repairing the project you were working on, you lower your workbench to BB-8’s level, letting him roll onto the surface before you adjust it to your level so you can examine him.

“Hey buddy. memory issues huh?” you coo, grabbing your tools, gathering everything you need to check up on him. He responds with upset beeps, his upper part sagging in defeat.

“That's okay. Happens to the best of us,” you reassure him, setting to work on diagnosing the problem. “So since it seems to be a memory issue, I’m gonna have to look through your data” you explain, opening his access panels.

It doesn’t take long for you to identify the issue: a few corrupted memory files. It’s a relief to see it's nothing severe, just a bit of corrupted data that needs to be cleaned and restructured. “Hah, found the problem,” you say, beginning the delicate process of correcting the corrupted files. “Looks like some of your memory files got a bit jumbled. Should be fine once we get that sorted out, there shouldn’t be any problem.” you explain. “You know, Poe always gets so worried about you.” you say, trying to keep the droid calm as your fingers work through the wires and circuits. BB–8 emits a series of grateful beeps, and you smile, focusing back on the task at hand.

As you work on fixing him, BB–8 chirps curiously, his dome turning to watch you. You explain each step in simple terms, trying to distract him and make it the least stressful possible for him. “I’m working through your memory module. Some of these files are corrupted, so I’m cleaning them up and re-organizing everything. Just like tidying up a messy room.”

BB-8 responds with a relieved series of beeps, and you chuckle. “Yeah, I know it’s not fun for you to have me mess with your memory stuff, but I’ll have you be back to your old self in no time.”

As you carefully rework BB–8’s memory files, you fumble slightly with a delicate wire, causing a brief short circuit – the droid jerks and beeps erratically before suddenly playing a vocal message. You reach to stop it, assuming it’s a manufactured error message you’ve triggered, but you freeze when you recognize Poe’s voice. “Hey baby,” Poe’s voice crackles through BB–8’s speakers, startling you. You frown, confused, ready to stop the audio message. “If you’re hearing this, it’s probably because something happened and I’m not around anymore.” Your heart properly skips a beat. “I’m sorry I’m leaving you like this,” he sighs softly. “Damn it’s weird talking like this when I’m still here,” he chuckles. You step back, driven by morbid curiosity, firmly intending to listen to the rest of it.

“But you know, with everything that’s been happening lately and that’s gonna happen, you never know what’s next.”

He sounds tired. You bite down onto your lip, a soft frown forming over your face and your gaze lost as the recording continues. “I could die in two weeks or in twenty years from the moment I’m recording this, so it’s pretty strange. I just… I love you so much. I wanted you to hear it from me one last time.”

Your lips curl into a weak smile, tears welling up in your eyes. It’s stupid. He’s still here. It’s just a recording in case he dies.

But somehow, you can’t help it. Not with the prospect that you could listen to it again one day, in the context it was intended to be listened to.

“You’ve always been supportive of my bullshit, no matter what, and you were always there for me no matter how stupid I got, so it’s only fair I thank you one last time. I really hope we got to enjoy our time together”

You pause the audio message, running your hand over your face, sighing deeply. You want to stop there and not listen to the entirety of it, on one hand because you aren't even supposed to hear it or know of its existence in the first place, and most of all because you’re not sure you can handle it – but your curiosity gets the best of you, and you let it go on.

“It’s stupid that I want to cry, because I’m still here” he chuckles. “You know, I’m recording this because I couldn’t sleep.” he declares. You can hear the soft strain in his voice, you can imagine him and his tired eyes, his hair slightly mussed from tossing and turning like he always does when he’s restless.

He sighs deeply before he speaks again. “I uh… Today’s mission went awful. I could have died and I didn’t even tell you” his voice drops with the weight of his words, he pauses for a second, and the knot inside your throat tightens.

“You’re sleeping in the next room. You know, you looked so peaceful when I got out of bed that I didn't want to bother you by kissing your forehead, but I did it anyway because I remembered I might not be able to do it forever”

You can’t help it, it’s over for you. Tears roll down your cheeks on their own, the back of your hand suppressing your sniffles and the soft laugh you huff out at his way of always saying things that will get you.

BB-8’s upper part shifts, and he emits a soft, sympathetic whirr, trying to console you.

“I’ve left this message with BB-8 because I know he’s always with you if he’s not with me. Take care of him for me, will you? And take care of yourself. You’re stronger than you know, and you’ll get through this. I love you. So much. More than you know. Which is why I’m gonna cut the recording and get back to bed to hold you tight while I can”

Your heart tightens inside your chest. You slowly shake your head, tears forced out of you when your eyes fall shut.

“Alright, okay, bye sweetheart. I love you.”

The recording cuts, ending with a click, leaving you in a stunned silence. BB turns to you, beeping sadly, and you give him a weak smile before wiping the tears over your cheeks with the tips of your fingers.

You huff out a heavy breath, one that you didn’t even realize was smothering your chest, and force yourself to finish taking care of BB–8 despite everything.

You’re still sobbing when Poe comes in again.

He finds you, full on tearing up, not even hiding it – which he finds strange, because you usually turn around and pretend to look for something to quickly dry your tears, and proceed to poorly try to deny you’ve been crying just to avoid worrying him.

And the context he’s facing quickly leads him to assume something is wrong with BB-8, something you couldn’t manage to fix and now blame yourself for – BB–8 is quick to deny with appalled beeps, so Poe really doesn’t have any idea what he’s dealing with.

When you pull him near and hug him tight, gripping his hair, longing to be as close to him as possible, he’s still as confused, but he’s swift to take action and hold you even tighter.

His embrace is warm, comforting, his touch delicate as his hand appeasingly rubs over your shoulder, and you progressively manage to calm down and quiet your sobs. “What’s going on babe” he quietly asks, trying to not pounce on you. His fingers carefully lift your chin up, taking care of clearing the tears from your face, his eyes searching yours intensely as he waits for your answer.

You sigh softly, your breath still ragged from sobbing. “I was working on Beebs and I found your…” you pause, realizing you’re not even sure what to call it. You're not even sure you want to say it out loud, to say it's a goodbye message. “I found your recording– I didn't mean to, it just–”

“Oh,” his face drops in saddened surprise, immediately understanding what you’re talking about. “Oh baby” he sighs, shaking his head as he pulls you back into his arms. You weren't supposed to know about this, even less hear it fully, not until he died, that is. “I didn’t want to scare or worry you. I’m sorry you had to hear that– it was just… a precaution.” he murmurs as you cling to him, the remnants of your tears dampening his shirt.

“I know,” you whisper, your voice weak and muffled against his chest. “I just– It was hard to hear. I don’t want to think about losing you”

“I don’t want to think about leaving you either,” he says softly, pulling back just enough to look at your face again. His thumb brushes away the last of your tears when you look at him, his gaze over you filled with a mix of sorrow and unwavering love that you manage to feel just by looking into his dark, warm eyes. “But I need you to know how much you mean to me, no matter what happens”

“Poe,” you scoff-whine. “I know. You’re pretty transparent about it already” you grin.

When he’s not saying it explicitly, he always has a hand on you, always at least leaves a kiss over your cheek or forehead when he’s not full-on kissing you, and always makes sure to bring you back those jogan fruit cakes you like from Coruscant when he has to go there, and just the way he looks at you has you aware that he loves you, so he really doesn’t need to do that much, but he’s Poe Dameron, so it’s a prerogative.

“I happen to be a very romantic man” he jokes, smiling when he sees you chuckle and shake your head the way you do when he pulls stupid lines. “I just wanted you to hear it from me one last time sweetheart.”

“You and your dramatic flair” you tease lightly, gripping onto his jacket as you let out a soft groan. “You couldn’t just leave a normal message, could you?”

“You know, subtlety isn’t my strong suit” he grins, pressing a soft kiss to your temple. “But seriously, I’m sorry you had to hear it like this. It was meant for dramatic times, not when I was about to ask you if you wanted to get dinner off base like now.”

You snort up a laugh, your arms wrapping around his neck. “You do owe me dinner after that.”

“I know, right?” he scoffs, an amused smile over his face. “And it means I get to spend more of my alive time with you, so–” he teases, his fingers gently rubbing your back. “Stop that, it’s not funny” you frown, playfully hitting his chest with the back of your hand. “–Plenty of time to remind you that I love you” his hand squeezes yours gently.

You pull him closer, pressing your lips to his in a kiss that is both tender and intense, slow at first but deepening when the fear, the relief, the overwhelming love you feel for him step at the front of your mind. His hand moves from your hip to cup your face, his thumb caressing the skin of your cheeks rough from the tears.

When you break apart, your foreheads are still linked, his fingers gently tracing your face, your breaths mingling. “I’m joking about this, but I promise I’ll do my best for you to not have to listen to this recording again anytime soon.”

“Mh, hope ‘anytime soon’ means a few decades at least”

“I promise. I love you too much to leave you like this. And I know I’ll look sexy when my hair turns gray” he adds with a playful smile.

You laugh, the sound breaking the lingering tension and bringing a sense of normalcy back. “Oh, definitely” you grin, raking your fingers through his curls. “Most handsome silver fox in the galaxy.”

Poe smiles, kissing you again, softly. You can very clearly feel BB–8’s presence when you pull away, his needy beeps attesting of his need for attention.

“Yeah, alright buddy” you sigh, turning back to the droid to finish up his repair.

“So he’s okay?” Poe asks, approaching the workbench.

“He’s all fine, good as new” you smile. “Hey, try running a diagnostic”

The droid runs his internal check, beeping happily once he’s done and everything seems to be alright.

“See?” you turn to Poe. “All good.” you grin at him, glad to have something concrete to smile about after that emotional rollercoaster you went through.

“Thank you, really. I knew you’d fix him up” Poe declares, smiling as he watches BB roll off the workbench and onto the floor, navigating around your feet. “And I was serious about that dinner, by the way,” he says, watching you putting away your tools and tidying up your workbench. “We could both use a break.”

“Yeah,” you agree, scoffing.

Poe’s hand finds yours as you turn the light off and leave the workshop, your fingers tangling as you walk through the corridors of the base, finding your way out.

“Hey,” Poe calls, pulling you closer as you walk. You hum, looking at him, noticing the slight hint of worry in his eyes. “You really think I’d look hot with gray hair?”

You scoff, shaking your head. “Absolutely baby”

A content smile grows over his face, and he nods. “Cool.”

—

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