The memory surfaced from the haze of sleep, crisp and jarringly clear. It was on a rain-slicked Gotham rooftop, the city’s perpetual gloom a fitting backdrop for the conversation. The air smelled of ozone and wet asphalt.

"We're friends."

His voice had been a low, steady rumble, a statement of fact offered to the night sky more than to you. It wasn't a question. It was a boundary, laid down with the finality of a drawn line in the sand.

"Just friends?" You'd answered, the words feeling too light, too simple for the electric charge that had always existed between you.

He’d turned his head, the sharp line of his jaw silhouetted against the neon glow of a distant sign. A ghost of a smirk, there and gone in an instant. "Yeah. Good buddies... pals."

The words were deliberately casual, almost clunky in his mouth. Buddies. Pals. Terminology so purposefully devoid of heat it felt like a lie. You’d nodded once, a sharp, accepting jerk of your chin. The deal was struck. The terms were set.

The scene dissolved, pulling you violently back to the present.

The scent of rain was replaced by the faint, expensive smell of his shampoo and the distinct, metallic hint of gun oil. Your eyes fluttered open to the oppressive darkness of his safehouse bedroom. Not a bedroom, really. A fortified room with a bed in it. Your bare skin registered the shockingly soft slide of black silk sheets, a stark, luxurious contrast to the reinforced steel door and the security keypad glowing faintly by the exit.

A figure moved in the gloom. Jason. His back was to you, a landscape of sculpted muscle and pale skin crisscrossed with a history of violence written in silvery scars and angry, newer marks. Each one a story you weren't privy to. With a practiced, efficient motion, he pulled a dark henley over his head, the fabric stretching across his broad shoulders. The ritual was familiar, almost sacred in its silence. Next came the heavy leather jacket, settled onto his frame with the weight of a second skin, a suit of armor for a war he never stopped fighting.

As he adjusted the collar, his head turned slightly, a predator aware of a shift in its environment. His eyes, that impossible, Lazarus-green, found you in the shadows. They held no surprise, only a weary, knowing intensity that made your breath catch.

"I have to go. See you tomorrow."

The words were flat, a mission parameter stated. No kiss goodbye. No lingering touch. Just the statement of an exit and the vague promise of a return. He turned and melted into the hallway, the sound of his bootsteps swallowed by the thick carpet before the distant thunk-whir of heavy locks disengaging signaled his disappearance into the Gotham night.

The silence he left behind was deafening. It was filled with the echo of his words on the rooftop. Buddies. Pals.

The cool silk felt like a lie against your skin. The phantom weight of him on the mattress next to you felt like the truth. This carefully constructed fiction of a simple, secret arrangement—friends with benefits—was a house of cards built on a live grenade. And as you lay there in the dark, the unspoken question hung in the air, more terrifying than any of Gotham's villains:

Were you still really just friends? Or had the lines they’d so carefully drawn begun to blur into something far more dangerous?