Chapter Text
Where…
Who is……
Is he………
…oh. He knows what this is. He recognizes it, knows it well. He’s dreaming.
It happens often enough. It’s only when he’s asleep, after all, that he feels these gentle hands and this soft hair, someone he knows well and who knows him in turn lowering him down with sweet, soothing words. Like he’s loved, like he matters.
He tries to hold onto it. The hands, the hair, this dream—it’s so good he wants to cry, wants to bawl, at how much he wants it. But the more he reaches the more he finds there isn’t anything to grasp, and his heavy arms drop, limp, to his sides, without a single touch.
He’s actually crying, now. He thinks. It’s hard to say for certain, not in a dream. But no matter how nice the dream, no matter how good his sleep… he knows it isn’t real. The truth haunts him, dogs his heels, lies in ambush at the corners of his vision. Out there… out in the real world… there’s no such thing as a gentle touch…
…and the real world cannot wait to let him know.
It happens in the blink of an eye. All in an instant, the hands disappear. The hair winks from existence. The dream falls away. And Jason comes to with a jolt as—
—agony—
—lances up his side.
Immediately, his training sets in, and he swallows down the pain to get his bearings. He’s lying on his back on a hard floor, shallow breaths gasping through his teeth, a bright table lamp shining down at his chest, so close the heat feels like it’s burning. Behind the light there’s a shadowed figure, its bulk leaning over him, menacing—he bares his incisors in a snarl before he recognizes the long ponytail and broad shoulders.
Roy doesn’t so much as flinch as Jason forces his muscles to untense. His fingers are prodding at the projectile buried in Jason’s flesh, too hard, too fast. “What in the… what the hell is this thing?” he asks, tracing a length of garrote wire that tugs at something deep inside.
Jason sucks in a shuddering gasp. “Friendly fire,” he bites out as soon as he’s got enough air. Then, because it’s been trained into him, he attempts to sit up.
“No, nope,” Roy says, and pushes him back down. He bites his lip, considers the projectile, and: “This thing has a targeting device in it. It’s aim is accurate as shit. You sure it was an accident?”
Gritting his teeth, Jason focuses on cataloging everything he can see. The lamp must have come from the table by his feet, the cord is hanging awkwardly off the side. Ceiling’s old, but serviceable—no water damage, no holes. Fridge somewhere above where his head is laying, stove to his right, cabinets all around.
Kitchen, he decides. Roy’s kitchen. He wonders for a moment if Roy is eating okay before a tug at the projectile in his side brings him back.
Roy is waiting for an answer, the sharpness of his gaze almost as cutting as the wire at his fingers. Jason grunts. “They don’t really like me much,” he says, and it feels like too much and not enough and he doesn’t know how to do this.
Neither does Roy, if the face he pulls is any indication. He snorts through his nose, something hollow and joyless about the tone. “Figures,” he mutters. “You’re real good at getting on people’s bad sides, you know that?”
Jason doesn’t dare say sorry. Instead, he says, “If you can get it out of me, you can keep it. Reverse engineer it, figure… nngh… out a way to counteract ‘em.”
“And if I can’t get it out of you?” Roy asks, his voice deceptively light.
Jason can’t help it—he rolls his eyes behind his mask, knowing full well Roy could always tell when he did that. Cold sweat drips down through his hair, the effort straining his lungs. He pushes through it.
“You can. The question—is if—you will.”
In the shadows, Roy shifts. “Alright. Fine. What if I won’t? It’s easy enough to get things off a dead guy, so—why bother?”
Jason’s hands are trembling, just slightly. He presses them to the cold kitchen tiles. The porcelain is slick with blood, nothing else within reach, the purchase he’s searching for literally slipping through his fingers. He forces his voice to stay even. “If you won’t… well, you and I both know I’m living on borrowed time, anyway,” he says, and it's just as light, just as deceptive, as if the thought of facing death a second time is simple tea-time fare and doesn’t scare the ever-living shit out of him.
The kitchen is silent except for the drip of blood, the tick of a mechanism meant to kill. The two of them are at an impasse, locked in a stalemate… each waiting for the other to break… until…
“Jesus,” Roy curses, closing his eyes. “Fucking goddamn hell. What the fuck happened to you, Jaybird?”
The way he says it—so natural, so easy—it’s as if the nickname simply slipped out, like it was waiting just at the tip of his tongue to find its way home. Where before, in the entryway, it was a pointed barb, said to highlight the vast difference between then and now… here it only serves to blur the lines. Between Roy and Jason, between light and dark, between right and wrong… between knowing you’re loved and knowing you can never, ever deserve it.
It feels like a kick to the chest. Or… or maybe that’s the projectile? Jason can’t be sure. The fucking thing is an automated death sentence, spilling outward from its entry point in thick, grinding spools of chrome and razor-wire, twisting and churning and constricting as it goes. Even if he’d wanted to answer, he can’t—his lungs feel like they’re seizing, breath locked up behind his teeth, a primal urge to claw at his throat and dislodge the blockage pouring over him, slowly but surely overcoming everything rational.
Somewhere above him Roy is talking, yelling, lunging for him—but all Jason can feel is the vacuum of his lungs as suffocation takes hold. Lines of fire rise, one after another, with each pass of his nails on the skin of his throat, his jaw, his lips, as he gasps and gasps and gasps and gets nothing down. He can’t breathe—he can’t breathe—can’t hear, or see, or move—and he doesn’t want to die, is terrified of his second death taking him again so soon, even more so of death spitting him back out once more, but oh, god, if this is it, if he’s actually going to die right here and right now then please let it be quick, let it be OVER, because he can’t—fucking—TAKE THIS—
—and then, all at once, with a deep, unearthly wrench, the sensation… stops.
Limp on his back, the projectile gone from his body, Jason sucks in a breath, his arms falling to his sides. One breath, then another, and another. He feels greedy, intoxicated with it, the air scraping in past his abused throat in huge, shuddering gasps and coming back out in thick, whooping coughs. It hurts, but god, it’s moving, in and out both, and he can’t get enough.
“—easy,” Roy is saying, when Jason tunes back in, the shrill ringing in his ears falling into the background once more. He’s holding his fisted hands against Jason’s side, against the gaping hole there, as if to hold him still. “Easy, easy—just breathe, okay? Don’t try to talk.”
“Y-you. S-s-saved me,” Jason says, instead of doing what he’s told. Sue him, he’s never been good at following orders—if Roy doesn’t know that after all they’ve been through, then there’s no hope left for him.
There’s a moment, a single moment, when Jason thinks maybe it wasn’t intentional. That Roy hadn’t meant to pull the projectile out, hadn’t meant to save his life. Jason can hardly see through the black spots dancing at the edge of his vision and the lamp casting Roy in pooling shadows, but he can see enough to watch as Roy’s face twists, screwing up into this awful, hollow humor.
Just as fast as it comes, though, it’s gone—but not just gone, it’s like it’s swept away, pulled under by the siren call of a riptide, as Roy folds like a puppet with cut strings.
“No, Jay, I… I didn’t… I don’t know how to fix this,” he says, and he could mean the hole in Jason’s side or he could mean the two of them or he could mean this whole entire bitch of a world. His back curls, and he bends forward until his forehead rests on Jason’s chest, his hands—gentle, so gentle, and Jason might be dreaming again, god, he doesn’t want to wake—holding Jason together. His voice chokes on a sob. “Jason, I don’t know how to—“
But you do, Jason wants to say. Because Roy is smart, damnit. He’s a veritable genius—a great well of information, a fount filled with all these amazing ideas that make Jason giddy like a kid at Christmas. Jason wants to tell him that of course he’ll fix this, of course he’ll figure it out—but the more he tries the more the dream curls around him, sedate and sweeping and so, so safe.
He can’t fight it. He doesn’t want to. It’s so real, one of Roy’s hands rising to curl under his chin, and he wants to cry all over again when a calloused thumb strokes under his eye, so gentle. He can’t remember when his mask came off, can’t remember baring his face to Roy under the blazing light of a lamp set on the floor in a dark, dank kitchen—but, all the same, it feels… right.
He closes his eyes, and he knows he’s loved, and that’s the last thing he feels for a long, long while.