You don’t remember when the night stopped being yours.

You had the wheel. Joker’s car. The city screaming behind you in blue and red strobes. Glass shattered across your chest like glitter. Your knuckles raw against the wheel. You were laughing. You were always laughing. It echoed through Gotham’s bones, through the tunnels beneath Chinatown, through the empty banks you’d painted in smoke and neon. You were a beautiful thing, a catastrophe in heels and blood-red lipstick.

And he was chasing you.

The Bat.

You didn’t have to look back. You could feel him. The heat of his headlights burned your spine. He’d been following you for blocks now—silent, calculated, no sirens, no warnings. Just that obsidian car like a shadow made solid. You could almost smell him in the air. Leather. Smoke. Rain on steel. He was everywhere and nowhere, watching you, waiting.

You screamed out the window, half-laughing, half-animal. “Come on then, you bastard! Catch me!”

You took a sharp turn off the GCPD bridge, tires screeching. The city cracked open beneath you—grime and ghosts. Joker had told you to disappear after this job. Blow the bridge, vanish into the Narrows, be a good little phantom. You never planned to listen.

You weren’t ready to stop playing.

That’s when the Batmobile slammed into your rear bumper.

The world spun. Your lungs seized. The car flew off the bridge, metal tearing like paper. And for a moment, weightless in the dark sky, you thought maybe you’d just burn up in the fall. Maybe it was over.

Then: impact. Water.

Everything went black.

You didn’t see the way he dove in after you—cowl, cape, armor and all. No hesitation.

You didn’t feel the way his arms wrapped around you under the waves, pulling you from the wreckage like you weighed nothing, placing you on the hood of his Batmobile. You didn’t hear the crack in his breath when he saw your chest still.

But you do feel it when you come back.

Air rushes into your lungs like knives. Cold, sudden, furious.

You wake with his mouth on yours.

Not a kiss.

CPR.

His gauntlet is braced at your jaw, his other hand pressing against your sternum. He’s focused. Efficient. Just another body. Just another night.

But then something breaks through the fog—his scent, his weight, his lips on yours.

You move. Instinct. Madness.

You kiss him.

Your mouth presses back into his with a flicker of something too human, too heated, too wrong—and it freezes him. Just for a second.

You feel it.

The stall.

And then his fist collides with your face.

Hard.

Not enough to break you, but enough to snap you back—to end whatever that was. You fall back against the hood of the car, head ringing, blood slick across your gums.

You laugh.

Of course you do.

Your tongue swipes across your lip and tastes copper and rain and something else.

“Was it good for you?” you whisper, voice rough, cracked.

He doesn’t answer. His jaw tightens behind the cowl. The mask betrays nothing, but you know what’s under there. You felt it.

He cuffs you—rough, unceremonious. You don’t fight. You giggle.

He lifts you like a corpse and throws you into the Batmobile, locking you into the passenger rig like contraband. Water runs off your skin. Your corset is soaked. You’re trembling from the cold or the thrill—you can’t tell anymore.

All you know is Batsy is interested.