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Jade, Dick thinks wryly, takes no prisoners.
This is their third mission in as many weeks and once again, he finds himself on a different team than Arsenal's; the serrations of their knife-fight seem to still be seeping blood and suddenly, everyone on this team is apparently an expert in field surgery. Different missions, alternate patrol routes, swapped shifts, the works. If Dick was certain that he could staunch the bleeding on his own, if he knew how to go back to bloodlessly clawing at each other, he’d make a quip — hell, maybe even a joke — about it all. Hey, hey, hey, who gets custody of the Pequod?
Then again, Dick hasn’t looked Roy in the eye since that night, so maybe Jade is onto something, after all.
He should want to. He knows that. Is keenly aware of it, in fact. Their shared wound. Once, Dick would have wanted to probe the injury with feverish want. Scoop out the clot of all that split trust. Maybe even stitch it back up with the one truth that will never be a misfire, not when he's aiming it at Roy. Sorry about all those things I said, Speedy. I’m a fucking idiot. You know that. You’ve always known that. Sometimes, I think you might be the only one who does.
Dick, however, is a parable of failure. Didacticism exemplified, then simplified. Nightwing’s mistakes are so colossal that they hang over him like a shadow.
Someone ought to do something about that. Batman, maybe. Use the litany of his extensive failures, teach Robin a lesson. Dig out the old projector, with its fuzzy imaging to soften the blow, danger-red alerts all over. Really commit to the thing. This is what you shouldn’t do.
There is so much to be sorry for.
He flattens the guilt into something retainable — something he can open later, when he’s not in the middle of getting shot at by an arms smuggler.
“Shift, get ready to engage. Disarm those two next to the crates first,” Dick commands.
Silence ensconces the comm-line like a bear trap, complicated and vicious; it takes him a precious four seconds to remember that he has overstepped.
This is Jade’s responsibility now.
It’d be easier to remember if she didn’t keep leaving all this nebulous vacuum for him to land in, but Dick is self-aware enough to admit that this is just a remnant of his bitterness. He’s being uncharitable. Jade is a good leader, Dick reminds himself. She’ll probably end up being ten times better than him, if the rest of her tenure is anything like the last few missions have been — seamlessly efficient. Nobody will get shot through the chest five times on her watch.
The adrenaline in his body doesn’t even have a chance to ebb before she pings Alpha Team on the comms again. Terse instructions to detain, followed by a debrief.
He’ll have to run a shorter patrol tonight. Inconvenient, but not much is convenient about his life lately. He'll just have to roll with it. Besides, Dick is in no mood to give anyone more ammunition against him.
Not tonight, anyway.
He declines a ride across the city with Jade and Indigo, opting for grappling back. It’s one thing to let one of the team’s fliers carry him when they’re in a time crunch and in the middle of getting blown up — but letting strong arms hold him in a catcher’s grip for no real reason — that’s too many ghosts.
HQ is quiet. Questions and answers on autopilot. Jade’s quick with it, though. Fifteen minutes is all she takes before dismissing them.
He lets the broken thing in him crawl up into his gut, snare around the adrenaline aftershocks. Penance is the name of the game.
Dick doesn’t expect to see Arsenal outside, talking to Lian’s sitter — Andrew, he thinks, pushing himself to remember — on the phone, supraspinatus muscles coiled dense, his holster digging into the meat mercilessly. He lets himself have this — looking at Arsenal for a fortuitous uninterrupted moment. Committing the clench of his jaw, the swoop of his uniform pants to memory. After those long weeks of feeling Roy’s absence like a searing hole, as he recovered from the consequences of Dick’s mistake, this — Roy, near him, all heart and somehow, miraculously alive — it’s a luxury, albeit one he doesn’t deserve.
He keeps watching as Roy ends the call with a tired sigh. Arsenal glances up at the intrusion in the hallway before Dick has the chance to slip away.
That’s not true. Dick lets himself be caught.
Roy tracks him with blinding intensity. In the sterile bone wash of the lights, he cuts like the opposite of a phantasm, thrumming scarlet and sharp.
Mean like a habit, mean like the parasitic symbiosis they’ve metamorphosed themselves into: “You need me to hit you again?”
Something awful, viscous like tar, surges up in Dick at his venom; he feels honey-fly-stuck.
Yes.
A terrible thought: What would Roy do if Dick answered honestly? Would he do it? Beat him black and blue?
They’re Nightwing’s colours, after all.
“Like you could if I didn’t let you,” Dick scoffs instead.
Arsenal doesn’t let that land, just tucks his phone into his pocket and gives Dick a cursory once-over. Maybe he intends for it to grate, but Dick hasn’t captured the roar of an audience in a very long time. These days, Dick lives his life in negative space.
Roy knows more about that than anyone else, because he continues, “Seriously? They had to separate us with energy constructs last time. You really want to go there again?”
That one only just mildly pisses him off. If Dick tries, he could let it burrow under his skin, fester into something noxious. It’s a good play. A tired one too, but that’s long stopped being a problem; it's not as though either of them will ever win again.
“Funny,” Dick spits out. “I didn’t know you were one for revisionist history. Last I checked, you were an equal participant.”
Roy’s eyes flash poison. “I might have thrown the first punch, but you were the one who drew blood first, Dick.”
It’s an old fallback, using his name like an insult — Gotham is full of sons of snooty businessmen who have done the same from the very moment Dick got swept up in billionaire Bruce Wayne’s orbit as a freshly orphaned eight-year-old. It doesn’t sting but only because even as a child, Dick knew how to hurt himself worse.
(Besides, he had Bruce.)
“It’s not my fault your conflict resolution tactics need work,” Dick says, saw-toothed, slowly lighting up from inside at the burgeoning lines of tension in Arsenal’s frame. Old habits, new inhabitations.
It’s sick.
He’s sick.
The hallway feels smaller, suddenly, as real ire flickers across Roy’s face. “What the hell is your problem, man?”
Oh, that’s funny. Like Dick has only one. Wouldn’t that be nice? A fresh change of pace. Just one problem to tackle with single-minded precision instead of dealing with the million unravelling threads he’s found himself tangled in.
Arsenal keeps a careful distance between them, fists curled in fury. Like he’s afraid he’ll swing if he comes closer. It’s that caution, that self-imposed show of restraint, that has Dick recalibrating.
“Roy…” he murmurs, forcing gummy-red authenticity to it. Look how I bleed. Do you still want me?
Every performance has a truth.
This is his: Dick doesn’t know how to get close.
Furious, matching his intensity like always, Arsenal hisses, “You don’t want to play this game with me, Nightwing.”
Dick doesn’t know how to apologise to him. One of them — usually Dick, with that terrible thing that lives in him, starved and mangled — finds a new way to hurt them both and then they both pick at their shared damage like injured dogs, when it’s still raw and tender, because doing it when it’s scarred over? That’s as good as leaving and neither of them knows how to do that right: leaving or being left.
Dick doesn’t know how to fix it — this team, them, himself. He doesn’t know how to get it right. He wants to want.
“I’m sorry.”
Pitiful.
Roy blinks — a flash of faint surprise on the handsome planes of his face — followed equally quickly by resignation. The physical distance between them lessens as Roy forces his body into placidity admirably — there’s a punchline here, something about archers and their strings, but then Dick thinks about the other kind of distance between them — the one that started with a grave and can only end with one, too. Always: vis inertiae.
With dark eyes, “I’m getting real tired of being your punching bag, ‘Wing.”
Dick doesn’t flinch.
Roy is capable of saying much worse. Owes Dick that, at the very least. Roy’s debt to collect, but he never does because he doesn’t operate that way. Just one more thing on the long list of things that Dick doesn’t deserve.
What makes a person? Dick has thought to himself many, many times over the years. On the heels of losing his parents to the slack of rope, through giving up Robin, eventually losing himself, to this — a poltergeist to his own life because the world has lost its wonder, because she —
It’s about choices. Gun to your head, it’s still a choice. Will you disarm with a jab to the solar plexus and let yourself believe in your lifetime of training? Or will you just take it?
All this to say, every action has an equal and opposite reaction.
(Senselessly: But I didn’t choose this. I didn’t want her to die. I would take her place in every universe rather than let anything happen to her.)
Predictably, Dick can’t bring himself to say anything to Roy.
Even if he could wield his sincerity like the weapon that that he has made of it, fragment his apology with a performance even Roy won’t break through, it won’t fix anything. There are no words that can fix the shatter-point of them; the most he can do is dull the edges, if anything. No satisfaction to be found, no siree, not for them.
Roy sighs, “Come here.”
Dick moves towards him, sinking into all the dead space.
He’s never had to wonder whether he’ll lose this — this strange thing that lives between them, the way he knows when Roy is smiling in the dark, or can map the contours of his face in his head, even over a comm-line; this unspeakable awareness of each other. Like there’s a matching tether inside him.
Roy looks at him artlessly, a defeated curl to the set of his shoulders — the crushing weight of their shared grief. Impossibly, it lets him meet Roy’s gaze head on, those pieces of Donna in him that ripple like starshine, the same ones Dick can’t stand to bear scrutiny to some days.
She loved him; how could Dick not love him, too?
“I’m sorry,” he says again, suddenly finding himself capable of making amends in whatever way Roy wants them, however he needs them. “I’m sorry,” he repeats, mindlessly, uselessly.
Roy silences him by pressing his lips against Dick’s firmly, eyes flitting shut, quick and tight, like he can’t bear witness to Dick for even one more second, like there’s something profane about it. Maybe there is. It always starts and ends with perfidy between them.
It’s not really a good portent but, well, Dick has trained his body to be a weapon; what difference does it make if it’s a catalyst for something that doesn’t beget violence? The lack of something doesn’t necessarily mean freedom from it — they both know how to hold an absence at their center like a life.
“Can I kiss it better?” he asks, faux-playful, through the kiss, giving Roy an opening to chase his tongue.
Roy meets him press for press, even as Dick licks up into the warmth of Roy's mouth, all teeth. Both of them like to talk a lot — god knows the Titans have made enough jokes about the two of them liking the sound of their own voices too much to listen to sense — but they’ve never needed to.
Roy’s hands, skimming over the blue on his chest, tighten, calloused fingers trying to bunch up into his suit uselessly, but all Roy does is bite back, vicious like razor wire — reparations, maybe.
So it’s like that, then.
“You can try,” Roy mutters, boxing him in against the wall.
Roy’s hands find the seams of the suit top quickly, practiced like a habit, before he slides them up, fingers skating over the tops of his ribs. Something in Dick goes cold at that but he doesn’t freeze up, doesn’t let himself disappear into his dissonance — that would have Roy backing off instantly.
He just lets Roy’s blunt nails claw at him before pulling away to grip Roy’s right hand tight. Hard enough to bruise, hard enough to hurt, hard enough that Roy won’t consider breaking the hold, but he immediately softens the blow of what Roy might think of as rejection by drawing up Roy’s finger to his mouth instead.
He swallows down to the knuckle.
Dick knows what he looks like, the hollowing of his cheeks, the sweep of his eyelashes.
Roy tracks the movement with the kind of severity he usually reserves for drug dealers. He pushes two more fingers inside, right up to the knuckles at the base of his fingers, letting Dick lick the taste of salt off of them. He strokes Dick’s tongue with them, roughly fucking into his mouth with just those long fingers.
Dick shudders.
“You want to take this to my room or you want to give everyone a show?” Roy asks, caustic about it, but there’s something hauntingly steady in his gaze. Dick bypasses that familiar brand of vivisection to focus on the desire painted across his features, because — that, at least — Dick can work with.
He wants to do this. Get them both out of their heads. Be good.
Dick pulls away with one last languid suck around Roy’s fingers. “Lead the way.”
Roy’s gaze is flinty as he makes an aborted half-fist that Dick can’t parse but his eyes are heavy with meaning. Swallowing, Dick follows him. Through the gunmetal hallways, past Grace’s room, to the threshold of Arsenal’s quarters. Roy’s fingers are steady as he punches in the access code and verifies his identity; Dick's never seen Roy’s hands shake, not once after the heroin.
Dick follows him in, prepared for — well, anything. It’s rare when he can’t read Roy with perfect clarity; usually, it’s because Dick doesn’t want to be presumptuous of his own estimation in Roy’s book. Tonight, all he wants is the press of Roy against him, no amnesty or accusations, because he lost all his nerve when they buried her, and he’s not brave enough to ask, How can you still trust me?
Roy shuts the door behind them, the auto-lock engaging with a soft whir.
The silence is rope-taut.
Dick doesn’t lend it any more weight and asks instead, forgoing coy entirely, “How do you want me?”
Roy looks at him with pity that he doesn’t even try to conceal, but Dick doesn’t move a muscle when Roy boxes him in — that’s starting to look like a thing tonight — against the door. He just tracks the sharp lines of Roy’s jaw counterposed against the darkness. He raises a hand to convert the idea from thought to touch but Roy grasps his wrist, snare-sure. Like a mirror to the hallway.
What was it Dick was thinking about equal and opposite reactions before?
“No,” Roy says, voice like steel. Dick hates himself a little for how the tone makes something hot and sharp curl up inside him.
“What, no hands?” Dick jibes.
“Why settle for that when you’ve got that beautiful mouth, huh?” Roy retorts, knife-edged, before he kisses Dick again.
It’s bruising. All teeth and heat, but Roy sucks gently at his bottom lip after he bites it, in order to — what? Soothe the sting? Doesn't he know? That he doesn’t need to do that? Dick hasn't earned it.
Instead, Dick pushes against him with fervour, almost animal about it, but he doesn’t let himself get lost in the feeling — any of it. Roy’s thigh between his legs, the harsh pull of his other hand barb-fisted in his hair. Maybe Roy picks up on that, because he tugs on locks of Dick's hair too forcefully for it to feel anything other than painful and finally, Dick gasps into Roy’s mouth with relief. The rush goes straight to his head.
“Is that what you want?” Roy murmurs, dark and all liquid bite, “What you need?”
Dick falls into him like a body into a grave.
For a moment, it’s just the heat of them; Dick imagines someone scanning through the walls of HQ and seeing the way they’re wrapped up in each other, bodies curled like crescent moons, close enough to look like one heat signature, melding together, hip to heart. Roy’s hard muscles, strong arms pinning his own, Dick's own legs falling open to chase friction against the sinew of Roy’s thigh. It’s good — it hasn’t felt good in so long that he wants to bask in it, pursue his own release because he doesn’t know when his wires will cross over and make it into something bad — but this is about Roy. He can be patient.
Roy has him pinned; Dick could break out of it easily enough, but that would drop the illusion, so he just mutters, letting desire rend his voice raw, “Can’t get your pants off if you don’t let me, Arsenal.”
To his credit, Roy unbuttons his pants and lets Dick untangle himself to slide down to his knees in record time. No romance about it, no pillows for his knees, but then again, this is a kind of penance, isn’t it? Besides, his desire and his pain — it all begins in the same place.
He mouths at Roy’s cock over his underwear, letting himself get messy with it, keeping an ear out for the steady wave of Roy’s sucked-in breaths.
Roy tangles his fingers in his hair. Not unkind about it, but unyielding all the same. Just keeping him in place. Dick’s about to pull his cock out of his pants, but like a flash flood, he remembers Roy’s words. No hands.
Well, never let it be said that he doesn’t rise to a challenge, let alone one issued by Roy Harper.
He presses at Roy’s briefs with his nose, using his teeth to pull them down. A sharp tug of want courses through him when he realizes how he’s following Roy’s arbitrary rules to the tee — nothing is holding him down or enforcing Roy’s instructions except Roy’s offhand words; it’s a hell of a thing, that kind of call-and-response, how badly he wants to be good.
“Jesus, look at you,” Roy says, half-reverent, half-incredulous at the way Dick is pulling his underwear down his thighs, using only his mouth. It takes a little maneuvering and by the time he succeeds, he knows there’s a trail of spit and precum glistening on his face.
When he has enough room, when the briefs are taut against his thighs — and fuck, it’s sinful, really, the spread of Roy’s thighs, all that dense muscle — Roy guides him forward. A stifled moan as Dick takes him down to the base.
“Fuck,” Roy punches out, fingers tightening in Dick’s hair. Dick hums in appreciation, letting his tongue sweep around the crown sloppily, looking up at him through half-lidded eyes.
Roy meets his gaze evenly, eyes dark with want, and the relief of it — all that self-imposed and team-aided radio silence, finally broken, even if it is through sex — is like a dam bursting. Dick feels lightheaded with it.
Like puppets in play, all predetermined motions and fluidity, Roy’s hands grip him tighter, the weight of him heavy against Dick’s tongue, but Dick draws back — just for a second, to lay it out — what he really wants, what he knows Roy needs.
“You wanna fuck my mouth, Speedy?”
Roy groans — a sharp, heady sound that goes straight to his own cock — head tipping skyward before he pushes forward, enticingly brusque about it, as Dick swallows up around him. Good.
Dick hollows his cheeks in response. The hot drag of Roy’s cock sliding across his tongue; he lets Roy set the rhythm.
He closes his eyes without conscious thought; the pressure of Roy’s relentless pace as he fucks into Dick's mouth is grounding, erasing every stray thought — nothing else exists except this — the two of them — his mouth, Roy’s cock. It’s been so long since his brain has been forced to stop from coming up with newer and more potent ways to make himself miserable that the respite is like freefall.
He loses time.
“I’m close,” Roy pants, the sound of his voice abrupt. Like a shock to the dangerous ecosystem they’ve created.
Dick’s eyes are tearing up from the lack of air, spit running down the sides of his mouth, onto his chin, onto Roy’s cock — everything slick and messy, but he doesn’t pull off. He just presses in even further, nearly gagging. He noses the base of Roy’s cock, knowing Roy will understand what it means.
Roy comes with a half-strangled stutter.
“Rob.”
It hits him like a punch in the gut.
How many times has Roy called him that? From that very first time at the Watchtower, hesitant but warm under his bravado — to the myriad other times as Teen Titans, an amalgam of exasperation, fondness and kinship — and now, half-frantic with desire but only baring open the underside of all that affection as he’s coming down Dick’s throat —
Dick can almost pretend that it’s the same; Roy calling him that, his name, Roy’s name for him.
Most of the time, Dick doesn’t let it bother him, this feeling, but here, on his knees, finally opening his eyes to see the faint glimmer of guilt on Roy’s face, it feels an awful lot like despair.
Dick tries not to let it linger, swiping the back of his hand — finally free from its invisible shackles now that the fantasy is broken — across his mouth, gathering the few stray drops of come and licking them off with a steadiness he doesn’t feel.
Roy inhales sharply at that, but instead of all the hunger from before, instead of that haze that let him fuck Dick's face, he just looks small. Guiltier.
You shouldn’t, Dick wants to say. I put a gun to your head and called it love. I don’t know what to do with you. I can’t stand your faith.
“Let me do you,” Roy offers finally, tucking himself back in, sliding his pants up.
Dick shakes his head, feeling oddly disconnected from the moment now that it’s over. “Next time,” he says, careful not to make it too mollifying. This was never an equal exchange, anyway.
It never will be.
Roy sighs, sitting down next to him.
Dick can’t bring himself to look at him, feels strangely brutalized doing it — so he just presses his face in the crook of Roy’s neck. Like this, with his nose buried against the staccato of Roy’s pulse, feeling it even out, he can pretend he didn’t see the wounded expression on Roy’s face; like this, Dick can pretend that he didn’t just make things worse.
He imagines it instead. Roy's panoptic gaze, heavy with overdue judgement. Look at me, he'd say, mouth full of blood. Look at what you did to me, Nightwing.
Eventually, Roy lets out a tired exhale, nudging him back up from where he’s hiding and makes a move to kiss him, but Dick sidesteps the motion with a perfect pretence of stretching out his knee.
“I should probably go. I’m meeting an informant tonight,” he tells Roy, avoiding eye contact as he adjusts his rumpled suit.
Dick feels like he's been split open but he does look up — just once — if only to feel the injury of it. Call it an accounting of his failure. Roy’s looking at him with a bland smile, hollow and haunted; Dick barely recognizes it.
Something splinters.
No one has done this to them — no, this, Dick has ruined all on his own.
“Sure,” Roy says, voice devoid of anything at all. “You do that.”