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The demon was contained, barely. Smoke bled from the cracks in Zatanna's shaking circle, and the warehouse's steel beams groaned like something alive. Alfred's wards had bought them twelve minutes. They were on minute ten.
"I need a blood seal," Zatanna said, her voice stripped of its usual stagecraft. "Human. Fresh. Now."
Dick was already reaching for his baton knife. "Where do you want—"
"The blade." Her hand closed around something on her belt—a curved, blackened dagger that seemed to drink the emergency floodlights instead of reflecting them. "It has to be this one. The circle is keyed to its resonance. But—" She hesitated, a fraction of a second that made Damian's hand drift toward his sword. "The curse on it is tricky. If I cut someone who isn't willing—truly, deeply willing—it'll turn. Necrotic feedback. It could kill them. Or worse."
"What kind of worse?" Jason asked, already scanning for exits.
"The kind where I have to put them down myself."
Silence. The demon screamed behind its failing prison.
Then Bruce moved.
No warning. No "I'll do it." He simply stepped forward, plucked the cursed knife from Zatanna's hand like it was a pen, and in the same fluid motion—
SLASH
Across his left wrist. Not the shallow, careful cut of a ritualist. Not the hesitation of someone bargaining. A clean, deliberate slice where the ulnar artery runs close to the surface. He knew exactly what he was doing.
The blood came fast. Hot. Black in the dim light.
"Bruce—" Dick's voice cracked on the name.
Zatanna caught his wrist before anyone else could move, already chanting. The blood spiraled into the circle's cracks, sealing them with a sound like a sigh. The demon's scream cut off. The warehouse went still.
Only then did Bruce look up. His face was calm. A little tired, maybe. The way he looked after a long board meeting.
"Seal it properly," he told Zatanna. "I'll apply pressure."
He did. One hand over the wound, steady as a surgeon's. The cursed knife lay on the floor between them, black blood already drying on its edge.
No one spoke for three full seconds.
Then Damian moved like a snake, snatching the knife with his armored glove and throwing it across the warehouse. It clattered into a corner, and for good measure, Tim pulled out a portable evidence bag and scooped it up, double-bagging it.
"You are insane," Jason said. Not angry. Flat. The kind of flat that meant he was doing math in his head, recalculating everything he thought he knew about self-preservation.
"It was the fastest option," Bruce said.
"You didn't even ask." Tim's voice was too high. "You didn't say—you just—"
"The curse required a willing donor. I was willing."
"We didn't know you were going to do that." Dick was already beside him, pulling Bruce's hand away to assess the wound. Pressure was holding, but the cut was deep. Too deep. "Zee, is this—is the curse—?"
"Clean," Zatanna said, breathless. "He meant it. Whatever the knife looks for in a willing heart—he meant it completely." She looked at Bruce with something like wonder. Or horror. "You didn't even hesitate."
"Hesitation would have been a lie."
Cassandra signed, one sharp motion: Stupid.
Bruce almost smiled.
---
Three hours later…
In the Cave's medbay, Leslie Thompkins had stitched him up and lectured him for twenty minutes. Alfred had stood behind her, radiating a disappointment that could curdle milk. Bruce had taken it all with his usual placid endurance.
But when Leslie finally left, the family stayed.
Dick sat on the edge of the gurney, close enough to feel Bruce breathe. Jason leaned against the wall, arms crossed, jaw tight. Tim was pretending to read a datapad but hadn't turned a page in an hour. Damian stood at strict attention by the door, a position he only took when he was afraid. And Cass—Cass sat on the floor, her back against the gurney, her hand resting lightly on Bruce's ankle through the blanket.
"I'm not apologizing," Bruce said quietly.
"Nobody asked you to," Dick replied. The words were gentle. The tone was not.
"I made a calculated risk—"
"You cut your wrist open with a cursed knife," Jason said. "That's not a calculation. That's a reflex. Your reflex is slitting your own wrist, B. Do you hear how insane that sounds?"
"The demon would have breached the circle in less than two minutes. The resulting explosion would have leveled three city blocks. I made a judgment call."
"We could have—" Tim started.
"There was no time to argue."
Damian's voice cut through, cold and precise: "Father. If you had died, the demon would still have breached the circle. We would have lost you and the city. Your death is not a resource."
Bruce went very still.
That, more than the blood, more than the knife, seemed to land.
"Alfred has already hidden every sharp object in the manor above a certain risk threshold," Damian continued. "I have done the same in the Cave. Mother always said you had no sense of self-preservation. I believed she was exaggerating."
"She wasn't," Jason muttered.
Bruce looked down at his bandaged wrist. The white gauze was already spotted through with red. He flexed his fingers, testing.
"I didn't think," he said finally. Quietly. Like a confession.
"No," Cass said. She looked up at him, dark eyes unreadable. "You never do. When it's us."
Another silence. Longer this time.
Dick took Bruce's uninjured hand. Held it in both of his.
"We're putting a lockbox on the medkit," he said. "You want sharp things, you ask permission."
"I'm not a child."
"No," Dick agreed. "You're worse. A child, we could strap into a car seat. You—" He shook his head. "We're going to have to watch you every second, aren't we?"
Bruce looked around the room—at Jason's rigid shoulders, at Tim's white knuckles around the datapad, at Damian's sentinel-straight spine, at Cass's hand on his ankle, at Dick's grip on his hand.
He looked, for a moment, almost confused. As if he had just realized they were all still here. All of them. Waiting.
"I'm fine," he said.
"You're an idiot," Jason corrected.
But he came over to the gurney anyway. They all did. Crowding in. Making sure.
Zatanna found them like that an hour later—Bruce asleep despite himself, his family arranged around him like a living barricade. The cursed knife sat in triple-sealed containment on the lab bench, tagged with a single label in Tim's handwriting:
DO NOT TOUCH. THIS MEANS YOU, BRUCE.
She smiled, just a little, and turned off the light.
---
Two weeks later, Bruce reached for a butter knife at breakfast.
Six hands intercepted him.
Alfred poured the tea without comment.
---