cxnfucius

[cxnfucius]

Literally just made this blog so I could post this one story bc I don’t have another place I can put it.

[cxnfucius]

Pathetic Fallacy

Tags: Hurt and comfort, Fluff, Jason Todd X GN Reader, slight OOC Jason

— — —

The city breathes beneath you, slow and indifferent. Lights blink in windows like tired eyes. Somewhere, far away, someone laughs. Someone is loved. It’s a noise you can’t reach.

You sit with your arms wrapped tight around your knees, a blanket draped over your shoulders like armor. Not for the cold. You aren’t sure what for.

Jason does not speak when he sits. He is quiet the way storms are before they break. Still, but watching. You feel him before you hear him. Like gravity, quietly insisting.

Minutes pass. The silence between you stretches, soft as thread.

“Are you alright?” he asks.

You don’t look at him. “Fine.”

He doesn’t press. Of course he doesn’t.

But something loosens in your chest. Enough that when the words come, you don’t stop them.

“It’s stupid,” you say. “I just… sometimes it feels like everyone else has it figured out. Love. Belonging. Like it’s something handed to other people and withheld from me. Like the universe decided I wouldn’t need it.”

He’s silent. But not distant.

And then, gently: “It’s not stupid.”

You glance at him.

He’s not looking at you, not fully. His gaze is somewhere just beyond, on the horizon, the lights, a thought he hasn’t named. His hands are braced on his knees, still, and tight-fisted.

“I used to think that too,” he says. “That it was for other people. That maybe I was born wrong. Too rough. Too much.”

Your throat aches. You don’t know what to say.

“Do you think it’s selfish,” you whisper, “to want someone who chooses you and stays?”

“No,” he says. “I think it’s the most human thing there is.”

There is a long, trembling pause.

The brush of his knuckles is not quite a touch. Not quite nothing.

It is the smallest thing he can give you, and it is everything.

You lower your eyes to the place where your hands almost meet.

“I hope,” he says, low like a prayer, “that when it comes, it doesn’t ask you to shrink to be loved. That it sees you as you are and calls you home.”

You don’t respond.

You can’t.

But you let your pinky curl against his. Just for a moment. Just enough.

And in that breath of closeness, something in him shatters quietly. Not loud enough for you to hear. But you feel the echo of it in your bones.

—

The days after that moment pass like pages turned in a book you cannot put down and yet cannot bear to read too quickly.

Nothing is said about the night on the fire escape. No grand confessions. No declarations. But something has shifted.

You feel it in the way he watches you now—more deliberate. As if he is memorizing the shape of you each time you turn away.

He walks with you in silence more often than he speaks. He lingers in doorways longer than necessary. His presence is not loud, it’s loyal. Steady. Like a shadow that never leaves, no matter how bright the light.

You think: if I turned around quickly enough, I’d catch him looking.

You never do. He is careful.

One evening, it rains. Not the kind of rain that lashes the windows or floods the streets, but the soft kind. The kind that feels like sorrow with no name. You are both caught in it, too far from shelter to outrun it. So you walk side by side, soaked to the bone.

Jason doesn’t offer his jacket. He simply moves closer—not touching, never touching—but you feel his warmth like a hearthfire beside you.

When thunder rolls distantly, you flinch, just slightly. It’s nothing, really. A reflex from some older hurt. But he notices.

He always notices.

His voice cuts gently through the rain. “You alright?”

You nod too quickly.

A beat. Then his hand hovers at your back, uncertain.

You stop walking.

And that’s when he looks at you. Fully, this time. No veiled glances, no glancing away. His eyes are storm-heavy. Unspoken things crash behind them like waves.

“I don’t want to overstep,” he says quietly, hoarsely, “but I need you to know… I see you.”

And you can’t answer.

Instead, you shift just enough that your shoulder brushes his. That’s all. The smallest of acknowledgments.

But for Jason, it is everything.

Because in this slow, fragile orbit you’ve built between each other, that small touch feels like a vow.

—

It doesn’t happen on a rooftop.

Not in the aftermath of a fight, or in the haze of pain, or while bleeding under a city that doesn’t know how to stop demanding things from him.

It happens on a morning so still it feels like a held breath.

You’re both in the kitchen. The sun is just beginning to pour through the windows, soft and golden, catching on the steam from the kettle. You’re barefoot. He’s wearing a threadbare shirt you think might once have belonged to someone else. It smells like smoke and soap and him.

The quiet between you is easy. You’re stirring honey into your tea when he says it.

Not loudly.

Not even while looking at you.

“I’m in love with you.”

The spoon pauses in your cup. Just for a second.

And when you glance up, he’s still watching the window. His shoulders tense, bracing for the world to break beneath his feet.

You don’t speak. You watch the light spill across his face.

“I didn’t mean to,” he says. “Didn’t plan it. I tried not to.” A soft laugh escapes him, bitter and breathless. “God, I really tried.”

He looks at you then. Really looks.

“And I know it’s not fair. I know I don’t have the right to ask for anything. I’ve got blood on my hands and too many ghosts behind me. I’m not clean. I’m not… safe. But every time I’m near you, I feel like… like maybe I was wrong about the kind of life I’m allowed to have.”

You set the spoon down.

He’s quiet again. The confession spent. Like he’s given away a part of himself he’ll never get back.

And still, he doesn’t ask.

He doesn’t beg for an answer.

Just stands there, the silence around him thick with a love too old for his years.

You move slowly. One step, then another, until you’re close enough to touch him. You don’t.

Instead, you say with a reverence of a truth you’ve only just discovered, “You always make the tea just the way I like it. Even when you pretend not to remember.”

His mouth quirks into something that might be a smile. But his eyes are cautious, searching. Like he’s trying not to hope.

You reach for him.

Your fingers graze his own, tender, open. And his hand turns toward yours like he’s been waiting for it.

“I love you too,” you whisper. “Quietly. Carefully. Probably longer than I realized.”

And something in him breaks. Like a window thrown wide to let the spring air in.

He doesn’t pull you into his arms.

He doesn’t need to.

He just stands there, breathing the same air as you, his eyes soft and stunned and full of something that finally—finally—doesn’t look like grief.

This is the moment the world tilts with its stillness. The ache in your chest does not vanish, but it shifts, it becomes something golden-edged, something you can hold.

And for the first time, you let yourself believe: perhaps this is the beginning. Perhaps you are allowed to want.