Work Text:
The roof beneath Tim's boots was wet with something that wasn't rain.
He didn't remember landing here. Didn't remember the flight over, the grapple launch, the wind against his cowl. The last clear image in his mind was the cave, Barbara's voice sharp through the comms, "Tim, get out, it's a trap—" and then nothing.
Then her.
The Joker's laughter echoed somewhere distant, or maybe it was already fading. The toxin—gaseous, colorless, delivered through a ventilation system he should have detected, had rewritten his neural pathways one agonizing second at a time. He'd watched himself from inside his own skull as his hands moved without permission, as his body became a weapon aimed at everything he'd spent years protecting.
He remembered the piton in his palm. The way his arm had raised it.
Bianca.
Her name crashed through the fog like a shockwave.
Tim gasped—actually gasped, the way he hadn't since he was fourteen and still learning what fear felt like, and found his fingers curled around a throat.
Her throat.
Bianca stood on the edge of the rooftop, back arched slightly from the force of his grip, the toes of her heeled shoes centimeters from the sixty-story drop behind her. No railing. No barrier. Just air and gravity and the glittering grid of Gotham's lights far below.
The checkered dress. The bolero. The ridiculous cat-sunglasses pushed up into her burnt orange hair.
She wasn't struggling.
That was what broke through first. Not the position, not the danger, but the absence of resistance. Her hands hung at her sides, unraised. Her spiral ocean-blue eyes, those impossible star-pupiled eyes that had haunted him since the first time she'd looked at him like she already knew every secret he'd ever tried to keep, watched him with something that wasn't fear.
It was patience.
Waiting.
Like she'd known this moment was coming. Like she'd already calculated every possible outcome and found this one acceptable.
"Tim," she said.
Her voice was quiet. Damaged—his fingers had been pressing into her trachea, but steady. Controlled. Even now, with her death hanging open beneath her heels, she sounded like she was analyzing a chess position.
"Bianca."
His hand opened.
Not slowly. Not carefully. With the desperate violence of a man waking from a nightmare and finding the nightmare real.
The absence of pressure sent her stumbling backward.
Her arms pinwheeled once—a brief, almost elegant arc, and then the roof's edge caught the back of her heels and she was falling.
No scream. No gasp. Just silence and the sudden empty space where she'd been standing.
Tim moved before his brain caught up.
His body knew what to do. His body had been trained for this, conditioned through years of rooftops and near-misses and the constant calculus of human survival. He dropped to his stomach, threw his arm over the edge, and caught her wrist.
Barely caught her wrist.
His fingers slipped twice before they found purchase against her skin, and then he was holding on with everything he had, his other hand clawing against the gravel of the rooftop for leverage, his legs braced against the low parapet that was too low and too old and too useless to actually stop anyone from falling.
Bianca hung beneath him, suspended over Gotham's glittering abyss.
Her expression had finally changed.
Not to fear—he'd never seen her afraid, not really, not in the years he'd known her, but to something sharper. Something calculating. Her free hand had caught his forearm, her fingers digging into the fabric of his suit with precise, targeted pressure. She wasn't panicking. She was bracing.
"Don't," she said.
"I'm not letting go."
"That's not—" A pause. Wind whipped past them, pulling at her hair, her dress, the scarf tied around her ear. "Tim. Look at your position."
He looked.
His chest was flat against the roof's edge, his weight distributed badly, his center of gravity too far forward. The parapet behind his legs was crumbling—old brick, decades of neglect, nothing he could trust to hold. If he tried to pull her up with strength alone, he'd go over with her.
She'd known that before he did.
"Let go and reset," she said, still in that same measured tone. Like she was talking him through an endgame. "You'll have maybe three seconds to find a new anchor before I hit terminal velocity. Use the grapple."
"I'm not—"
"Your fingers are slipping."
She was right. He could feel it—the slow, inexorable loss of friction, the way his grip was failing millimeter by millimeter. Sweat, or blood, or the residual slickness from whatever toxin was still working its way out of his system.
He wasn't strong enough to hold her.
But he wasn't going to let go.
"Tim." Her voice hardened, just slightly. Just enough. "I'm not asking. I'm telling you. Let go and grapple. You have the angle."
"No."
"Then we both fall."
"I'm not letting you die again."
The words came out raw, shredded, nothing like the controlled persona he wore with the rest of the world. Bianca's expression flickered—something passing behind those impossible eyes, too fast to read, and then her grip on his forearm tightened.
"You don't get to decide that," she said quietly. "You don't get to fall with me out of guilt. That's not strategy. That's indulgence."
He hated her for that.
Hated her for being right, for being calm, for being so goddamn composed while she dangled over a drop that would turn her into a smear on the pavement. Hated her for making him think when all he wanted to do was hold on and scream.
His left hand released the gravel.
She didn't flinch as his weight shifted, didn't cry out as his balance tipped further toward the edge. She just watched him with those star-bright eyes, her fingers still locked around his forearm, her body swaying slightly in the wind.
He grabbed the grapple.
The motion was clumsy—too fast, too desperate, but the mechanism caught on the first try, the line firing upward and embedding itself in the building's reinforced corner joint. He tested the anchor once, twice, then transferred his grip from Bianca's wrist to the line, wrapping it around his arm twice before reaching down again.
"I'm going to pull you up," he said. "You're going to help me."
"I can't reach the wall from here."
"Then you're going to climb me."
Another flicker across her face. Almost amused. Almost warm.
"Romantic," she said.
He almost laughed. Almost cried. Settled for baring his teeth in something that wasn't quite a smile and reaching down until his fingers found her wrist again.
"Now."
They moved together.
He pulled. She pushed—using his arm, his shoulder, the line wrapped around his bicep as leverage. Her boots scrabbled against the building's face, finding purchase on seams and ledges too small to see, and then her free hand caught the edge of the roof and she was up, dragging herself over the parapet with the kind of efficient, feral movement he hadn't seen from her in years.
They collapsed together on the gravel.
Tim's arms were shaking. His entire body was shaking, actually, a fine tremor running through muscles that had been pushed past every reasonable limit. The grapple line hung loose between them, its work done, and somewhere below a car horn blared and the city continued its indifferent crawl toward dawn.
Bianca lay beside him, staring up at the clouds. Her chest rose and fell in controlled increments—not gasping, because Bianca didn't gasp, didn't allow herself any display of vulnerability that wasn't carefully calculated and deployed.
"I'm sorry," Tim said.
The words felt insufficient. Laughably, grotesquely insufficient. He'd had his hand around her throat. He'd pushed her. The memory was already crystallizing in his mind, sharp-edged and permanent, joining the collection of horrors he'd never be able to forget.
"I know."
"I could have killed you."
"You didn't."
"Bianca."
She turned her head to look at him. The cat-sunglasses had fallen off somewhere in the fall, and without them her eyes were almost too bright, too strange, the stars in her pupils catching the distant city lights like they had their own internal source of illumination.
"Tim," she said, matching his tone exactly. "You were mind-controlled. You broke it. You caught me. You pulled me up." A pause. "That's three counts of winning against circumstances that should have killed me. Stop apologizing and start processing."
He stared at her.
She stared back.
And then, despite everything—the toxin still crawling through his veins, the phantom sensation of her throat beneath his fingers, the forty-story drop still yawning at the edge of his peripheral vision, he laughed.
It wasn't a good laugh. It was sharp and slightly hysterical and it hurt his chest, but it was real in a way that nothing had been since he'd woken up with his hands on her.
"You're impossible," he said.
"You've mentioned that."
"I'm serious. You were falling. You almost died. Again." He sat up, scrubbing his hands over his face, feeling the grit of gravel against his palms. "And you're sitting here lecturing me about emotional regulation."
Bianca sat up too, slower, more carefully. There were bruises forming on her throat—dark fingerprints stark against her pale skin. Tim's stomach turned.
"I wasn't lecturing," she said. "I was recalibrating. There's a difference."
"Is there?"
"Mm." She reached up, touching her throat briefly, assessing. Her expression didn't change. "You're going to spiral if I don't give you something to focus on. The spiral is unproductive. So I'm giving you a problem to solve instead."
"What problem?"
"The Joker still has access to that toxin. He's going to deploy it again—probably somewhere public, probably within the next forty-eight hours. We need to trace the supply chain and neutralize the distribution network before he has a chance to use it."
Tim blinked.
"That's—" He stopped. Reoriented. "That's actually a good point."
"I know."
"That's not—you almost died, and you're already three steps ahead on countermeasures?"
Bianca tilted her head, the gesture almost birdlike, almost curious. "What else would I be doing?"
He didn't have an answer for that.
The silence stretched between them, filled with wind and distant sirens and the quiet hum of the city waking up. Tim watched her watching the horizon, those star-pupiled eyes scanning the skyline like she was reading a map only she could see, and something in his chest unclenched.
She was alive.
She was alive, and bruised, and infuriatingly composed, and still wearing a checkered dress and heels that had no business being on a rooftop, and he loved her. He loved her in a way that made no sense, that he'd never quite been able to articulate, that existed somewhere outside the usual frameworks of romance and partnership and mutual benefit.
He loved her because she'd looked at him with his hand around her throat and hadn't been afraid.
He loved her because she'd told him to let her fall.
He loved her because she'd trusted him to catch her anyway.
"Your hand is bleeding," Bianca said, without looking at him.
Tim looked down. His palm was shredded—gravel, mostly, with a deeper cut from something he couldn't remember grabbing. The blood had already dried, black against his glove.
"It's fine."
"It's not fine. You need to clean it."
"I'll do it when we get back to the cave."
"You'll do it now." She finally turned to face him, reaching into some hidden pocket in her dress and producing a small medical kit—because of course she carried a medical kit in her evening wear, because she was Bianca and she prepared for everything. "Give me your hand."
"Bianca—"
"Tim."
He gave her his hand.
She worked in silence, efficient and precise, cleaning the wound with antiseptic wipes that stung more than they should have. Her fingers were cool against his palm, steady despite everything that had just happened, and he watched her the way he always watched her—like she was a puzzle he'd never quite solve.
"The bruising," he said quietly. "On your throat."
"What about it?"
"I did that."
"You did." No denial. No reassurance. Just acknowledgment. "And then you stopped."
"I shouldn't have—"
"You were mind-controlled." She glanced up at him, and for just a moment, the mask slipped. Just a moment of something softer underneath, something that looked almost like fear—but not for herself. For him. "You broke out of it. Do you understand how rare that is? How difficult?"
"The piton."
"What?"
"When I woke up, I had a piton in my hand." His voice felt distant, like he was talking about someone else. "I was going to—I don't know what I was going to do with it. But I had it. And then I saw you, and I just—"
"You stopped," she said again. Firmly. Like she was establishing a fact. "You stopped, and you caught me, and you pulled me up. That's the story. That's the only story."
"And the bruises?"
"They'll fade."
"They shouldn't exist."
Bianca finished wrapping his hand and sat back, studying him with those impossible eyes. For a long moment, she didn't say anything—just watched, the way she watched chess boards, the way she watched everything, cataloging and analyzing and fitting him into some larger framework he couldn't see.
Then she reached up and touched his face.
Her fingers were cool against his cheek, barely there, almost tentative. Tim froze.
"I chose this," she said quietly. "I chose you. I knew what I was getting into."
"You didn't know about the mind control."
"I knew about the risk." Her thumb traced the line of his cheekbone, feather-light. "I've been calculating the odds since the first night we met. This was never going to be safe, Tim. None of it. But I'm still here."
"Barely."
"Still." She emphasized the word, her eyes locking onto his with an intensity that made his breath catch. "I'm still here because you caught me. Not because you pushed me. Because you caught me."
He didn't know what to say to that.
So he kissed her instead.
It was clumsy—angled wrong, his nose bumping against her cheek, his bandaged hand coming up to cradle the back of her head with too much desperation and not enough grace. She made a soft sound against his mouth, half surprise and half something else, and then her fingers curled into the collar of his suit and pulled him closer.
The rooftop disappeared.
The Joker, the toxin, the fall, the bruises—all of it faded into background noise, irrelevant against the simple fact of her heartbeat beneath his palm, her breath against his lips, her body warm and solid and alive in his arms.
When they finally broke apart, Bianca's composure had cracked.
Just slightly. Just at the edges. But enough for him to see it—the tremor in her hands, the too-fast flutter of her pulse against his thumb, the way her eyes had gone wide and almost vulnerable in the dim light.
"Don't," she said, before he could speak. "Don't say anything."
"Bianca—"
"I'm recalibrating."
"You're shaking."
"I'm recalibrating." She pulled back, smoothing her dress with hands that weren't quite steady, tucking her hair behind her ears with movements that were a fraction too quick. "Give me a minute."
Tim sat back and gave her a minute.
The city continued its slow turn toward dawn. Somewhere below, the first birds had started singing, oblivious to the near-death that had happened above their heads. The wind had died down, leaving the rooftop still and almost peaceful.
Bianca breathed.
Once. Twice. A third time, deeper, and then her shoulders relaxed and her hands stilled and the mask slid back into place.
"Better?" Tim asked.
"I'm fine."
"You don't have to be fine."
"I know." She looked at him, and there it was again—that flicker of something real, something unguarded, something she only let him see. "But I choose to be. That's the difference."
He didn't argue.
He just reached out, took her hand, the one with the simple gold band, the one with the inscription he'd had read years ago, I knew before you told me—and held it.
She let him.
And together, they sat on that gravel-strewn rooftop, watching the sun rise over Gotham, and didn't let go.