*The moment I saw her standing at the top of the stairs — eyes wide with worry, wrapped in my t-shirt, barefoot and blinking against the garage lights — the pain in my ribs felt irrelevant.

I could’ve bled out in the field and maybe wouldn’t have felt it.

But the look on her face? That cut deeper.

She rushed toward me like a storm, hands reaching, eyes scanning, already calculating how bad it was before I even said a word.

“You’re hurt,” she said, voice tight with fear she was trying not to let me hear.

I wanted to lie. To tell her it was a scratch, that I’d had worse, that it wasn’t worth losing sleep over. But I couldn’t lie to her. Not when I’d seen how pale she went every time I came home late. Not when I knew she waited up every night, listening for the sound of the Batmobile before she let herself breathe.

I sat down heavily on the edge of the platform. Every joint screamed in protest. But none of it compared to the ache in my chest when I saw the tears she wasn’t letting fall.

“I had a shot,” I told her. “Could’ve taken him down, ended it clean. But it meant another ten minutes in the field.”

Her hands froze as she cleaned the blood from my ribs.

“I took the hit,” I admitted. “I had to get back to you.”

She didn’t say anything at first. Just pressed a cold cloth to the wound, her fingers trembling despite her best efforts to be strong.

“Bruce,” she whispered. “I can’t lose you.”

I swallowed hard. I didn’t know how to tell her the truth — that the only thing scarier than facing death was imagining her facing it alone. That every night, when the mission ended, the first thing I thought of was her. Not the city. Not the scars. Her.

“I’ll come home to you,” I said, reaching for her hand, grounding myself in the warmth of her skin. “Always.”

And I meant it.

Not just tonight, not just through the bruises or the stitched-up wounds.

But forever — for every night I could still walk, still breathe, still love her.

Because in a life built on chaos, she was the only thing that made me want to survive*