Archive of Our Own

“I mean, this is how far gone I was – I thought heroin loved me. When I was jacked-up, I felt embraced somehow. I felt safe.”  - Roy, in Arsenal #3

When Roy steps out onto Dinah’s front porch, it’s the first time he has left the house in over a week and he doesn’t remember it being this big out here before. Somehow he is surprised that everything looks the same; it seems impossible that grass could still be green and the sun would still rise in the east even when his own world has been utterly uprooted.

Idly, he wonders for a brief second if Kaldur will be the same, too. If that’s even possible.

(It’s not.)

The ten minute walk to the zeta transporter is done in near-complete silence. It's probably the longest Roy has been on his feet at one time, and he is exhausted by the time they arrive at their destination, glad that he’ll have a drive to his apartment when he gets to Star City. When it comes time for him and Dinah to part ways, it occurs to Roy that despite the fact that a good ninety percent of his words to Dinah these past eight days have been some form of apology or thanks, he has done very little by way of actually demonstrating any of it, and he knows that even if it ends up being the most curt and uncomfortable articulation of gratitude to ever be expressed, it’s something that needs to be done.

Dinah speaks his name before he can come up with anything appropriate to say. Her voice is soft and makes Roy raise his gaze. She’s biting her lip in the way that Roy has had all week to learn means her heart is breaking for someone else, and Roy hates that he is that person, doesn’t deserve to be that person, doesn’t deserve any of what she’s given him, really.

She places her hands on his shoulders and for a moment it almost seems like she is going to draw him in for a hug. Roy realises he wouldn’t actually mind that – this whole ordeal has made him alarmingly cuddly, and he makes a note to self to fix this before anyone starts to notice.

“You think about what we talked about, okay, boyo?” Dinah says, looking him evenly in the eye.

“Mm hmm,” Roy mumbles unconvincingly.

She gives his shoulders a reassuring squeeze. “You can do this.”

This would probably be the optimal time for that thank you Roy had been trying to muster up. Maybe if he was bold enough, he could even choke out some promise to her that she needn’t worry, that everything will be okay.

What he manages is a grim, determined smile and a scarcely intelligible, “I... oweyouone.”

“You owe yourself,” Dinah replies simply, tweaking him gently on the nose. “Now go on. Kaldur is waiting for you.”

Roy almost winces. He’s been dreading this moment ever since he’d been lucid enough to feel anything other than pain. Then again, he supposes that this could apply to almost any given moment in recent memory. Never a single second of relief, always moving from one fear to another, each seeming more insurmountable than the last. If he’s lucky, they keep linear for long enough for him to tackle them one after the other, but they seem to greatly prefer all toppling on him all at once.

One thing at a time, Dinah had repeatedly reminded him.

He takes a deep breath and flashes her an overly bright grin as he steps into the transporter. He feels his body tingle as his molecules reshuffle and Seattle becomes Star City and when he opens the door of the telephone booth, Dinah is gone and Roy can already see Kaldur at the curb standing by Roy’s parked car.

He looks the same as always, just like the grass and the sky and the asphalt all look the same, and in a way this is almost crueller than if he were to have become unrecognisable, because Roy can’t bear to see that same face, those same love-wet eyes, the same muscles rolling beneath that same smooth inked skin, all the while knowing that really nothing is the same at all. The familiarity mocks him, taunts him, jeers at him.

Suddenly the outside doesn’t seem so huge anymore. The only distance that exists is the five metres between the telephone box and the sidewalk and nobody seems to be willing to be the first one to cross into that no man’s land.

Roy eventually advances three steps, hesitantly, waiting to see what Kaldur will do.

Kaldur does not move from where he’s standing by the car.

He is making Roy come to him.

Something that Roy has never quite managed to do when it really counted. He figures he owes Kaldur this much, so he crosses the remaining paces in several long, defiant strides until the only thing separating them is two feet of space.

Then again, there are some distances that cannot be measured with a yardstick.

“You look well,” Kaldur tells him, even though it’s not true.

Roy gives an uneasy grin. “I feel… better.”

That part is true, though also somewhat akin to saying you were once dying of thirst but feel better because you’ve had a drink so now you’re only starving to death.

Kaldur takes Roy’s bag from him and throws it into the back as Roy slides into the passenger seat, his movements clumsy due to the stubbornly lingering cramps in his legs and the base of his spine. He's pretty sure that this drive is going to be the longest seven minutes of his life. Feeling his claustrophobia rushing to the surface in a panicky surge, he rolls down his window and then reaches over to turn on the radio, needing any sort of distraction. Slides the tuner dial up and down several times over. Switches from FM to AM and back again. Keeps it mumbling on static for a few minutes. Then gives up, turns it off, and shifts his weight uncomfortably in his seat.

He wishes Kaldur would just fucking say something already. It’s like being a teenager and coming home with a bad report card or alcohol on your breath and having your parents keep eerily silent all night even though you know they know, and the longer they’re quiet, the worse the inevitable outburst will probably be.

At least, he supposes that’s what it’s like. He can’t really say for sure because it’s not like Ollie ever really busted his chops about that kind of thing.

Or any kind of thing.

Except Roy knows exactly why Kaldur has not initiated any kind of dialogue, and that is because Kaldur knows Roy well enough to respect his need to do things on his own terms.

That’s always been the problem with this damn kid, Roy thinks wildly to himself. He’s always respected Roy too much. Roy knows that if that’s the only thing he can complain about in this relationship then he’s damn lucky, but he hates it because he feels like a fraud. Like he has somehow tricked Kaldur into giving him credit he doesn’t deserve. Even if it isn’t necessarily undeserved, Roy certainly hasn’t earned it - as he has disastrously proven every single time anyone has ever let him have any semblance of independence and he has thanked them by fucking up in every way imaginable, plus a few more ways that hadn’t even been invented yet.

Roy will have to break this silence himself.

“Thanks for picking me up,” he

tells the forty-something driver of a silver BMW, the words sliding from his lips in a slow purr that sounds nothing like his real voice. Normally he wouldn’t get into a car with someone he’d solicited off the Internet but he had already met this man a few times before without incident, and if he’s willing to give Roy a ride to and from the motel then hey, Roy saves on his own gas money. It may be less than a ten mile round trip but Roy knows all too well that a couple of dollars can sometimes mean the difference between life and death

says finally, and even though he’s not exactly offering up some profound lead-in statement, it’s enough for Kaldur to know that it is now safe for him to talk.

“How are you doing?” he asks carefully.

Roy shrugs. “I’m just glad it’s over.”

Even though he knows it’s not.

Kaldur knows this, too, because he states, “It is far from being over, my friend.”

“That’s where you’re wrong,” Roy murmurs.

Kaldur shoots him an apologetic glance. “I- I did not mean to imply that you have not accompl—”

Roy hushes him with a helpless smile before he returns his gaze to the road, eyes fixed on the shimmering horizon that never gets any closer, and he explains quietly, “It’s never going to be over.”

Kaldur is silent until they hit the next red light, at which point he takes the opportunity to lean over and kiss Roy on the neck. Roy tilts into his touch in a way that he can’t seem to recall ever doing before, and realises for the very first time that while everything may be different now, perhaps some of the changes won’t be so bad after all.

The first thing Roy notices is that his apartment has been cleaned. He certainly appreciates this, because he vaguely remembers what it had looked like when he’d left and it definitely wasn’t pretty, but as grateful as he is, the tidiness also gives him an inexplicable sense of malaise. It’s unnatural. Forced. It’s a town newly reconstructed after a firebombing where everyone has tried so hard to replicate the original buildings but the attempts are over-compensatory and fall cold and flat. No matter how quaint the cobblestone or how imposing the cathedrals, there will always be ashes and death roiling palpably underfoot.

He takes off his shoes but stays rooted in the entranceway of the room as though afraid he’ll fuck everything up just by taking another step.

Then something else occurs to him.

If the place has been cleaned, then there's no way that whoever cleaned it did not discover certain incriminating items that towards the end he had no longer even bothered to hide.

“Did you find… everything?” he asks Kaldur, voice low and toneless to mask his inner panic.

Kaldur heaves a sigh. “Yes… It was all properly disposed of.”

“Fucking hell,” Roy mumbles.

Two minutes after walking through the front door and he has already encountered a road block. It’s a silly one, he knows, not even worth fighting about, but at the same time, it feels all too monumental.

His works were all he had left, like a photo of a dead lover, and now they are gone and he didn’t even get to say goodbye.

He remembers a former girlfriend telling him about how she felt the first time she sold a print of one of her photos – like she was auctioning off some private part of herself to someone who could never fully appreciate or understand its meaning.

At the time, Roy had secretly thought Donna was being a bit over-sentimental, but now, as he mourns a couple needles, spoons, and a length of rubber tube, he acknowledges that her sense of profound loss was perfectly valid.

He clings to the futile hope that perhaps not all his things have been cleared out, that somewhere in his house there will still be some tiny remnant that he'll be able to retain as a memento, though of what or why, he isn’t fully sure. It occurs to him that perhaps the more innocent of his effects might still be around, but the thought provides little solace, since you just can’t get the same twisted kind of comfort from an alcohol swab or a cotton ball as you would from the lethal simplicity of a syringe.

They had no right, Roy decides. No fucking right to go through his stuff like that.

He almost tells Kaldur this but it’s kind of an embarrassing thing to be so upset about, and won’t exactly help this whole trust-building thing that he’s supposed to be working on. Plus, he would hate to start things off with a fight when the situation is already so precarious, so he keeps quiet.

Distantly, he feels Kaldur’s hand on his shoulder, anchoring him, and again he leans in towards him, like a plant twisting to meet the sun.

“Dinah suggested that we try to come up with some sort of plan,” Kaldur says gently.

The first thing Roy notices is the word ‘we.’

“There is no ‘we,’” he says flatly.

Kaldur narrows his eyes and Roy immediately regrets what he said. It was exactly this kind of delusion of self-sufficiency that had gotten him into trouble in the first place. Now here he is, five minutes into this alleged new chapter of his life, and already he’s fucking up as usual. And not even in new ways. With the very same mistakes that he was supposed to have learned from.

But Kaldur merely nods and says, “Yes. Of course you are ultimately the one who makes all the decisions. I will not interfere.”

His tone is worryingly final, and it sure as hell sounds like something someone might say before they walk out the door, and Roy can’t let him do that, he just can’t. He just got Kaldur back and by some miracle Kaldur still wants to have something to do with him. By some similar miracle, Roy realises that he wants this, too; or rather, he’s always wanted it, but just never dared to allow himself to keep it, let alone express a need for it.

But if he’s only just learned how to accept help from someone else, then how the hell is he supposed to know how to ask for it?

“Kaldur,” he croaks out. “D’you… Do you think you could… stay…? Just for a little?”

“Of course, friend,” Kaldur replies with a warm smile and produces something from his pocket. “Why else would I have brought back my toothbrush?”

Roy swallows hard, distinctly remembering the fight they'd had before Kaldur had stormed out of his apartment and taken all of his things with him.

He laughs nervously. “Well, you don’t have to stay that long…”

“I will be here for as long as you need,” Kaldur says solemnly.

His sentence feels unfinished, though, so Roy asks, “But…?”

“But… but while my love for you is unconditional, my presence is not. I know I have let you get away with a lot in the past. That will no longer be the case.”

Roy stares at him, stunned. This is perhaps the first time Kaldur has really set his foot down and drawn the line. While Roy is certainly not about to blame Kaldur for how far he’d let things go before setting a boundary, he admits that there had been times when Kaldur's legendary patience had tried Roy’s own nonexistent one.

Probably leftover resentment from his issues with Ollie, whose leniency had been all too easy to interpret as neglect.

“I have been doing some… reading,” Kaldur explains, sounding almost apologetic. “I have learned that the way I acted… before… was in fact doing more harm than good. I had not yet come to recognise that giving you what you wanted, or even what you needed, was not necessarily the same as doing what was best for you.”

“Kaldur…” Roy says helplessly.

“Speaking of what is best for you,” Kaldur continues, “I have put you on the Team’s inactive duty roster for the time being.”

Roy nearly bursts into laughter, all tension abruptly gone, leaving a hysterical relief in its wake. “Dude, what the hell else kind of roster did you have me on for the past, what, two years? Hey, wait… what about you? What’s the Team going to do without you, o exalted leader?”

“I am sure they will manage.”

Roy wishes he could say the same thing about himself.

That first night, Kaldur takes the couch and Roy sleeps in his own bed – for a total of about three or four hours, at least.

What little rest he does manage is punctuated by a strange nightmare in which he accidentally injects into an artery which causes his arm to rot and fall off and then Dinah checks him into an Arkham-like rehab centre and never comes back.

Also, a dead cat.

He spends the first couple of days holed up inside, not quite certain he trusts himself with leaving the house. Hell, he barely trusts himself inside the house either, but at least inside is a hell of a lot smaller and easier to deal with.

The days are long now that he’s not spending every minute of them on heroin. He is stunned by just how much free time he suddenly has. His entire schedule was once mapped solely by when he would need another fix. He planned each day around when he would need to pick up more. He was always either doing heroin, buying heroin, or making money to buy heroin and repeat the routine all over again.

It's almost a relief to no longer be completely consumed by this drive, but the downside to not having your whole day gobbled up by all of this is that it just gives you all the more time to think about how much you want to be doing it. 

This whole affair has been decidedly anti-climactic.

Roy had unconsciously come to the conclusion that once he got through the worst of the withdrawals, everything else would just sort of magically resolve itself, too, and it would all be smooth sailing from there. He would be a changed man. He would have a normal life again, or at least as normal as possible for someone in his line of work.

He would be cured.

…Not so much.

His intial sense of overwhelm upon leaving Dinah’s house has long since receded and he is now beginning to notice just how little has truly changed.

How little he has changed.

He still looks half-dead (though perhaps only a quarter-dead on a good day). His muscles still twitch with a bone-deep ache that crushes and creaks. His sleeping patterns have yet to regain any semblance of balance. His appetite and energy both continue to be MIA.

Heroin still seems like a viable option.

And Roy is still the same scared little boy he’s always been (a leopard cannot change his spots, after all), except now the rest of the world knows it, too.

“Jesus, Kaldur,” Roy hisses. “How… how… how’d’you even get n’here?”

“Your door was unlocked,” Kaldur replies, expression unreadable.

“Oh. Whoops. Shit.”

Vision blearing up, Roy closes one eye to concentrate on Kaldur’s face and gets worried when it appears that Kaldur is displeased. Roy looks down at himself wondering if it’s something about his own appearance – he’s pretty dishevelled right now, but to his credit he had managed to shower and change his clothes, which is a lot more than he can say for most days – certainly Kaldur has seen him in worse states and not been bothered. Perhaps it’s because of how embarrassingly messy the place is? Clothing that isn’t his thrown over the back of the sofa, cigarette ash (in his defence, also not his) and unopened mail scattered across the living room table. A peek into the kitchen reveals a mountain of unwashed dishes in the sink and the stench of a garbage can that desperately needs emptying.

Roy is flustered, because Kaldur is so neat and composed and perfect and suddenly the messy house is symbolic of all the ways in which Roy is not good enough for him, which is something Roy has always been agonisingly aware of. For some reason, Kaldur has yet to pick up on that fact, but it’s really only a matter of time, and Roy half-hopes Kaldur will come to his senses sooner rather than later, because the longer Roy has Kaldur convinced that Roy is a good person, the more betrayed Kaldur will feel when he ultimately finds out the truth. He needs to run as far away from Roy as he can, because Roy can’t bear to let down yet another person who had believed in him, no matter how misplaced a faith it might have been.

“You should’ve told… mmmmm… told me you were coming,” Roy drawls. I…’d’ve… cleaned up… the place…”

“Actually, I had informed you of my intention to visit, just yesterday,” Kaldur grinds out, tone venomous with an intentionally over-exaggerated courtesy that Roy is too out of it to pick up on.

“Oh dear,” he sighs, a dumb, dopey grin plastered on his face like he’s some fifties sitcom character whose shtick is being adorably absent-minded. “Hey… hey. Lissen. There’s this… nature doc… document’ry… on in forty minutes… Snow leopards. Snow… lep-leopards. They’re so beautiful. You’re so beautiful. Y’should… watch it with me.”

A swirl of anger ripples through the normally still tidepools of Kaldur’s eyes. He shouts something, looking and sounding furious, but Roy isn’t paying attention, repeats something about snow leopards. Kaldur shakes his head, swears, then leaves, slamming the door behind him in an uncharacteristic burst of rage.

Roy stares at the doorknob for a long, long time, regaining relative lucidity a while later only burst into tears upon realising he’d missed the show about the goddamn snow leopards.

Eleven days clean and Roy is already sick of it.

Isn’t he supposed to be living some kind of vastly improved life now? Wasn’t that why he had forced himself to endure endless days of what he was quite certain was the worst pain a person could feel without actually dying?

He can’t believe he went through all that… for this.

For feeling sad and scared and just generally out of sorts in this subtle and insidious way that is in some respects even more maddening than acute, identifiable pain. He’s pretty sure he actually feels worse than before. Not worse than during withdrawal, of course, but certainly worse than before he had stopped using, and, come to think of it, definitely worse than before he had even started using.

What a shit deal.

…Except for not, because really it’s his own fault that he’s getting the short end of the stick.

He would like to be able to feign an innocent but I don’t understand what went wrong when I’ve been doing everything right kind of confusion, the sympathetic kind that will make people cluck their tongues and coo just hang in there darling, you’re trying so hard. He would like to be able to pretend he is mystified by the apparent lack of progress, but he knows exactly why everything still feels stagnant.

Because, save for deleting all the numbers of his dealers and user friends from his phone (more of an empty gesture just for show than anything meaningful, since he still has quite a few of them committed to memory), he has yet to dare to move.

Whenever he even so much as thinks about taking another step, everything in the entire world immediately seems impossible. If he’s lucky, he merely feels discouraged and overwhelmed and decides to think about it later. More often, though, he’ll end up crawling under the blankets and laying there for hours because staring at a blank wall is just about the only activity he can manage.

Funny, how a sleepless week of puking, shitting, sweating, aching, and shaking suddenly feels like the easy part.

What comes now is a whole different ball game.

Dinah had spoken to him for a long time before they had left her house. He doesn’t remember many specifics, but the gist of it is still there. She stressed how crucial a time this is. How he will likely have to conduct a complete overhaul of his life if he doesn’t want everything he just went through to have been for nothing.

First off, she told him, he would need some sort of plan. He may be clean, present tense, but he has no idea how to stay that way for the future tense. He will literally have to relearn how to live, and according to Dinah that means he will have to take everything one step at a time, and allow himself to make use of the support system he has – herself, his teammates, even (cringe) Ollie.

“Don’t shut us out, Roy,” she’d pleaded, which was funny because it was like she had been able to read his mind – he had indeed been considering returning home and never leaving the house or seeing anybody else ever again as his main course of action. He wisely chose not to express this potential plan, though, and Dinah proceeded to give him a list of resources in his city, mostly typical suggestions like Narcotics Anonymous or finding a counsellor for more one-on-one therapy, and she also urged him to call her or anybody else if he needed to.

It all sounded good in theory, but it involved so much sharing.

Not only is Roy an intensely private person by nature, but he’s also lived most of his life hiding something or other, whether he’s twelve years old and faking laughter at his classmates’ homophobic jokes so no one will know that he finds boys to be just as appealing as girls, or fourteen and split down the middle by a mask and a yellow feathered cap, or seventeen and shooting up five times a day.

He figures the fewer people who know about that particular part of his life, the better. Fewer people to lie to, fewer people to disappoint, fewer people to make amends with.

Already he is going to have to work so fucking hard just to have his few friends be able to look him in the eye. He is going to have to regain their trust, prove himself to them again, and, most importantly, not fuck up anymore.

Then perhaps as time goes on, this will all eventually fade into some kind of distant memory and will no longer be something that defines him. He’ll be able to head out into the world again, all bright-eyed and rosy-cheeked, and anyone new who meets him from that point onward will just think he has been this healthy way all his life. No need for them to know the truth. The truth is over and done with. This is who he is now and no one needs to know that he was ever anything else.

He just wishes the same could be said of the people who are currently in his life. That he could somehow erase their memories of the past few years so he can have a clean slate with them, too.

Still, things aren’t all bad on that front. This is possibly because the only people he’s really interacted with so far have been Dinah and Kaldur, but he’s surprised at how seemingly smoothly things have fallen back into place with the latter.

Their movements are soft, synchronised in shyness, not quite trying to recreate what once was, but more like seeing what they can forge from what remains. Roy prefers it this way, he thinks. It may be awkward and uneasy at times but at least it’s never forced, never desperate.

Roy has also found himself discovering new things about Kaldur each day, tiny things, precious things, the things you notice when you’re beginning to fall in love with someone. Or in this case perhaps it’s more a matter of re-discovering them now that they’re no longer on the backburner like they had been previously, along with everything else in the world that wasn’t heroin.

The flecks of pearl that shimmer in Kaldur’s eyes when they’re struck by a certain light. The slightly different way he holds his cutlery to accommodate the sensitive webbing between his fingers. How when he is trying to suppress a smile and failing, it’s always the left side of his mouth that betrays him first.

It’s not every day that Roy is invited to a Martian’s birthday party.

Despite the novelty, he is reluctant to attend. After all, it’s only been a few months since his dramatic departure from the Team; he is still wary of Artemis; and he barely knows either M’gann or Conner, who is apparently the one who planned the whole affair, knowing that M’gann had been curious about how birthdays are celebrated on Earth.

(Roy doesn’t know how a technically five-month-old half-Kryptonian clone would know the first thing about any of this, but he is polite enough not to ask.)

Aside from all that, though, Roy just isn’t good with these kinds of gatherings – or any other social functions at which standing sullenly in a corner would be considered inappropriate.

“Lighten up, Roy,” he’s heard a thousand times, but he had no idea how to do so.

Until now.

So when Kaldur, Dick, and Wally all combine their forces of peer pressure to convince Roy to attend the party, he relents, and shows up at the Cave armed with a very special secret weapon.

Roy’s heard all sorts of horrors stories about people who become monsters to others when they’re high.

That afternoon, he discovers that they were all lies.

Because being high is great.

Turns out the whole world loves him when he’s high.

He is no longer the sour, confrontational Roy Harper that gets on everyone’s nerves. No, he is this mellow little cloud of amiability that people actually enjoy having around.

“Wow, someone’s in a good mood today!” somebody says, Roy isn’t sure who, he just grins lazily and agrees.

Even Kaldur seems to like him more when he’s high. He sees the way Kaldur’s eyes light up with a look of slightly befuddled delight when Roy sneaks him a kiss for no reason other than just because. Yes, Roy is pretty sure that Kaldur prefers this pleasant, affectionate incarnation of him just as much as everyone else does.

Including Roy himself.

Just like the rest of the world, Roy likes himself a hell of a lot more when he’s high, too, which is the best part of all.

Kaldur sways against him as they all sing Happy Birthday, M’gann sitting directly ahead of them at the other end of the table, wearing a pink party hat and holding a balloon animal that is either a short giraffe or a cat with an extremely long tail. When the song ends, she closes her eyes, makes a wish, and proceeds to blow out the candles as per protocol.

Except she accidentally uses her Martian superbreath.

Not only do the flames go out, but the entire cake and a couple of plates and cups fly through the air. Wally manages to catch all the glassware but the cake smacks into Roy’s chest with a wet slap.

Everyone gapes. Nobody moves.

M’gann looks mortified.

Roy looks down at the mess, then at Kaldur, who Roy is maliciously pleased to see has a bit of icing on his face, including on the edge of his mouth, which is trembling with the effort not to burst into a grin. It’s a futile attempt. That left corner quirks upwards before the rest of his lips quickly follow and Roy’s own lips follow, too, and laughter rings throughout the Cave like a spring symphony because everyone likes Roy Harper better when he is high.

Roy wakes up on lucky day thirteen clean and decides what better way to taunt bad fortune than to do something that scares him shitless.

He skims through the list of support groups that Dinah had given him and picks one of the nearest locations in order to minimise the amount of time and distance during which he might change his mind. He can’t seem to tell Kaldur about it outright for some reason, so instead he just calls Kaldur over and points to the address of the church where the meeting will be taking place.

It takes Kaldur a moment to register what he’s looking at, but once it comes together, he starts nodding his head slowly, the smile on his face widening by the millisecond.

“Great,” he says. “This is really great.”

Roy meekly smiles back at him, unable to resist picking up a bit of Kaldur’s contagious joy, but at the same time he feels awfully silly.

Kaldur is looking at him like he just won the fucking Nobel Peace Prize. Is this really what it has come to? Has he really fucked up so badly that everyone’s expectations of him have lowered to the point where walking out the door becomes this historic accomplishment? He used to be a hero for god’s sake.

Oh how the mighty have fallen.

This notion is further reinforced fifteen minutes before they should be heading out the door, when, after having emptied out almost his entire closet onto the bed, Roy realises he doesn’t know what to wear.

“Actually, I can’t go anymore,” he announces, walking out of the bedroom and plopping down onto the couch, still in the T-shirt and sweatpants that he uses as pyjamas.

Kaldur looks worried. “And why is that?”

“Nothing to wear.”

“I am sure your attire will be of very little importance to those who will be present.”

“I look like shit.”

“There will be people who look worse.”

Roy scrambles for more excuses. “I don’t really do that whole 'sharing is caring' thing.”

“You could simply listen,” Kaldur suggests, being the sensible little fucker he is.

“I guess,” Roy says, very dubiously, because the only thing he hates more than talking about his own problems is having to hear someone else talk about theirs.

He is pretty sure that this makes him a total asshole.

He stares at his hands and watches himself twiddling his thumbs for a very long time before he finally looks up and says grimly, “Okay, you know what, fuck it, I won’t even get dressed at all, let’s just go.”

Kaldur raises a quizzical eyebrow but does not protest.

It’s a ten minute drive to the church. Roy spends the entire ride coming up with more reasons why they should turn back.

“I don’t have anything to say.”
“I think I’m going to throw up.”
“I don’t see how this is going to help.”
“I think I’m going to throw up.”
“What if it’s secretly this religious thing? I mean, it’s in a church after all…”
“I think I’m going to throw up.”
“I don’t wanna listen to a bunch of junkies’ sob stories for an hour.”
“It doesn’t look like we’ll get there in time. Everyone will look at me if I walk in five minutes late.”
“What if I throw up?”
“What if I’m the only new one there.”
“What if I’m the youngest one there.”
“What if I’m the oldest one there.”
“What if I’m the only one there?!”

Kaldur chooses not to dignify any of Roy’s increasingly neurotic anxieties with a response.

Fair enough, Roy supposes.

The car eventually slows to a stop in front of their destination. Roy’s entire body is trembling like a leaf, which irritates the hell out of him because he’s not supposed to be an anxious person. He never has been; his recklessness would never allow for it. He may not particularly enjoy immersing himself in an unfamiliar environment or having to meet new people, but that’s always just been because he hates everything. Now, however, it’s because he fears it.

Kaldur gets out of the car and waits for Roy to shakily emerge from his seat, too.

“Just give it a shot,” Kaldur urges him. “I am going to park the car and perhaps check out the shops down the street. You can call me when it is over, or whenever else you wish to leave.”

Kaldur has barely made it around the block when his phone rings.

“You did not last very long,” he says when he returns to pick Roy up, his tone a bit too brusque for Roy’s liking.

They both get in the car but Kaldur makes no move to start the engine.

“Hey, I fucking gave it a shot, okay?” Roy snaps back, spitefully over-enunciating the word with the all too obvious double-meaning. “It was horrible.”

“How could you have deduced this in a mere five minutes?”

Roy slumps in his seat, suddenly feeling crushed. “I just… I didn’t belong there at all. They were all older than me. Many of them have been doing this for most of their lives. I’ve been a junkie for, like, ten minutes. Big fucking deal. They were probably thinking why the fuck is he even here?”

“Stop,” Kaldur cuts in frustratedly. “Stop minimising this.” Roy opens his mouth to object but Kaldur doesn’t let him. “Perhaps your memory has been compromised by your recreational activities, but let me fill you in. Four years is not ‘ten minutes.’”

Roy fumes at what he believes is Kaldur’s exaggeration of the situation. Sure, Roy may have started dabbling with drugs when he was barely fifteen, but it wasn’t until the past two years or so that it really got bad. He starts to point this out, but Kaldur must know what Roy is going to say because he holds up a hand and continues before Roy can get a word in.

“Regardless of how long it has been, it was a ‘big fucking deal.’ You lied, you stole, and who knows what else. You hurt us. Y-you... scared us. Every time the phone rang, I was certain it was going to be someone telling me you were dead. Do you have any idea what that is like?”

“You’re not using ‘I feel’ statements,” Roy points out bitchily, clinging desperately to his anger and trying to keep it at a critical enough level to block out the shame.

He hopes Kaldur will keep railing at him, will say something else that will give Roy an excuse to continue to be angry, but instead Kaldur just closes his eyes and seems to compose himself before he says, “You’re right. I apologise. I was being accusatory and it was out of line. It is just so… difficult… to hear you speak of this time as though it has not profoundly affected us all.”

This son of a bitch, Roy thinks to himself, feeling a bit hysterical and trying as hard as he can to be infuriated by Kaldur’s unbelievable even-temperedness. It was a lot easier before, when the single-minded nature of his addiction clouded all judgment to the point where any well-intentioned action from someone who cared about him felt like a totally uncalled-for attempt to control his life. It’s only now that the reality of how lucky he is has started to register. He shouldn’t have any friends left after the things he’d done, least of all Kaldur, who had perhaps received the brunt of Roy’s abuse despite being the least deserving of it. Roy can no longer find it in himself to be exasperated by Kaldur’s dogged patience because he now knows that anyone any less forgiving would have long since walked away.

“I didn’t mean it that way,” he fumbles brokenly. “I know I fucked up pretty bad and that it fucked you guys up just as bad if not worse. But… there was a guy in there who at his worst was injecting into his dick because he had no more veins. His fucking dick. I mean…fuck! Compared to that I might as well be a fucking Mormon.”

“You cannot compa—”

“I know, I know,” Roy interrupts tiredly. “C-can we just go home now? Please?”

Kaldur wordlessly obliges.

Roy shuts down. What he had not told Kaldur was that it wasn’t just the fact that he felt his own struggle was almost laughably frivolous next to the others. If it were just that, he might’ve been able to tough it out for a little longer, might have been able to stay long enough to learn something. But there was more. A couple of the members had been clean for years, the longest being a woman who had not used in nearly a decade, and a few others had spent just as long in various levels of sobriety, never quite able to make it stick.

That was what had frightened him to the point where he couldn’t stand to be in the same room any longer. The fact that, even after all that time, all that effort, they were still here. Still going to these meetings, still slipping up every now and then, still caught in a constant battle with themselves.

He’s always been abstractly aware of the old adage once an addict, always an addict, but, just like just about every other addict on earth, he had been quite confident that it somehow would not apply to him.

For perhaps the very first time, it has finally sunk in, really sunk in, that this is something he might have to fight for the rest of his life.

Leaning against the window with his head craned upwards, watching the telephone poles whoosh by, he can’t help but to wonder if it’s even worth it.

"I think you should take a break," Roy says the following evening as Kaldur is using his powers to wash about a day’s worth of dishes.

“There are only a couple plates left—”

“That’s not what I meant.”

Kaldur stiffens visibly, letting the dishes land gently in the sink before he turns around and joins Roy on the couch.

“You wish for me to leave?” he asks.

“No! …I just. It’s not like I don’t want you here, because you’ve been so fucking helpful… You’ve been a lifesaver. Literally. I don’t know how you’ve even managed to put up with me for this long – and I’m talking about a lot longer than the past two weeks – but I think… I don’t think I’ll be able to get any better if I keep letting people do everything for me.”

“What are you going to do, then?” Kaldur wants to know. “You say you do not wish to continue letting others do everything for you. What are you going to start doing for yourself?”

Roy frowns. “I don’t know. Just… you know… normal stuff.”

“How convincing,” Kaldur quips, but he’s smiling a little.

“I just want to be able to haul my own weight again,” Roy sighs frustratedly. “I need to know if I’m able to.”

“Are you ready?”

Roy bursts into harsh laughter. “Fuck no, are you kidding me? But I figure… this way, I’m going to have to. You know, like those people who teach their kids to swim by throwing them in the pool and hoping for the best.”

“That seems… unwise.”

“I’m gonna keep afloat, Kaldur,” Roy says with a firmness that he doesn’t quite believe.

“And if you find yourself beginning to sink?” Kaldur asks quietly.

Roy tries not to look lost. “I…”

Kaldur leans in towards him until their foreheads tap together, noses almost touching, and he murmurs, “Never forget, friend… I do know a thing or two about how to swim.”

Kaldur doesn’t seem to want to step into the telephone box.

“Go!” Roy tells him, making an emphatic shooing motion with his hand. “Get out of here! Be free!”

Kaldur chuckles slightly. “If you insist.” Pause. “You will be okay?”

Roy gives a shaky smile. “Yeah. I will.”

Kaldur looks as though he wants to say something more, like a mother fussing over her child on his first day of school, but fortunately seems to be able to sense that Roy has had just about enough of that so he merely says, “Well, um, I shall be on my way then.”

He looks so awkward and shy all of a sudden, and for a moment it feels like two years ago, when Roy had just walked him to this very spot after their first real date and had wanted so badly to kiss him, but didn’t.

This time, though, he does.

The apartment feels different now that Roy is once again its only occupant.

It feels free.

He thinks maybe he’s made a terrible mistake shooing Kaldur home like that.

He thinks maybe he doesn’t even regret it.

Sure enough, not even fifteen minutes after being left alone, he finds himself rummaging through his closet and sock drawers and pant pockets, even in his kitchen cupboards, hoping to find one last sticky bundle of tin foil or a seemingly empty baggie that could be turned inside out and scraped with a razorblade to yield a few last pinches of precious powder.

It’s only when he starts looking in the fridge that he really seems to realise what he’s doing and just how fucking crazy it is.

He slams the fridge shut, turning around and leaning against it as he slides dramatically to the ground, banging the back of his head into the door as he goes.

For a long time, all he can do is sit there and try to breathe. When he was dopesick, the cravings had obviously been palpable on a physical level, but it never occurred to him that his brain alone could also produce such a shockingly visceral feeling of complete and total need, comparable to being deprived of air, like snarled fingers pinching his lungs, leaving him helium-headed and gasping for breath.

When he can finally move again, he heads to his room and spends over twenty minutes straight obsessively reentering and deleting an old dealer’s number back into his phone’s directory while he can still remember it.  Twenty minutes of creating a new contact, thinking about calling it, then feeling guilty and deleting it only to add it once more a few seconds later.

At some point, he is able to break the cycle by calling Dinah, feeling a bit strange that she is the one he’s found himself instinctively turning to in a time of need. Not Ollie, not even Kaldur. No. Dinah. His guardian’s girlfriend, with whom he’s never really had a real relationship until now, though of course the week spent at her house was the most vulnerable he’d ever let himself be around another human being, so perhaps that’s exactly why she is the best candidate for this.

Every ring during which the phone goes unanswered sounds like a chainsaw whirring next to his ear and just allows him more time to think about what had just happened. It had almost been frightening, how sudden and how intense his cravings had been. They had utterly consumed him, reducing him to a mindless bundle of rabid want and desperate need. What the fuck had he been doing? Had his eagerness to get rid of Kaldur unconsciously been for reasons other than wanting to prove his own competence?

Well, he’s certainly proven something.

What bothers him most is that he can’t even figure out what had come over him. That’s what he’s supposed to try and keep track of, right? His triggers?

He hates the word. The way it makes him feel like a faulty hand grenade, delicate and volatile, doomed to devastation and destruction if someone even so much as jiggles the pin.

(Or if he hears a certain word or passes through a certain neighbourhood or catches a whiff of a certain scent.)

His best guess is that this frenzy occurred because he has long since come to associate being alone with the freedom to get high, if not even a reason to get high. In the beginning, he very much enjoyed being high in the company of others, whether with other users or as surreptitiously as possible around his friends from the Team. However, as time went on and he progressed from snorting to shooting, he started to prefer doing it alone. Returning home became the highlight of his day. He’d look forward to coming back after missions, after hanging out, after anything, eager to kick back and relax, undisturbed by others trying to mooch off him, free to leave his works lying around wherever he wanted, not having to worry about trying to keep up with any conversations.

“Roy?” comes Dinah’s voice in a flurried rush, interrupting his wreck of a train of thought. “Oh gosh, Roy… It’s so good to hear from you. How’ve you been holding up?”

“Kind of… badly.”

“Oh no. Are you all right? You haven’t… have you?”

“No,” Roy says sharply, hating himself for feeling so affronted by the question, which was asked innocently enough, and certainly not without justification. “It’s just that I… I sent Kaldur home a little while ago, and then – but don’t tell him this, ‘cause it’s pretty pathetic that it doesn’t even take me a full hour to… Well, I kind of… went nuts.”

He glances around the bedroom, sickened by the evidence of his frantic search. Sock drawer emptied out onto the ground, closet looking like a bomb went off in it, books ripped from their shelves and shaken in search of anything that might have been pressed between their pages.

“You did the right thing by calling me,” Dinah says gently.

“I guess…”

“Have you been doing anything else?”

Roy frowns, a bit confused. “You mean other… drugs?”

“No! I mean some of the options we’d talked about.”

Roy might be paranoid but he could swear he detects a hint of impatience in her voice. Again, not unwarranted. He knows that the grace period allowing him a slight reprieve between detox and actual recovery has just about run out and he is going to have to start actually doing something but the very idea of it still seems incredibly daunting.

“I went to some support group meeting like two days ago,” he says defensively. “It sucked.”

“What kind of meeting was it?”

“Oh, I don’t know. I just sort of picked it at random. And it was horrible. I don’t think that kind of thing is for me.”

“Roy… you can’t play spin the bottle and expect it to land on your soulmate. Don’t get discouraged. These things take time. And research.”

“I have researched,” Roy insists. “All these groups, they all say the same fuckin’ thing.”

“It’ll take some trial and error. Try thinking about the kinds of people you would feel the most comfortable around. Maybe you could find a group whose members you can relate to better. A youth group, perhaps?”

“I haven’t exactly had the same kind of youth as most kids,” Roy notes dryly.

“Still, there have to be some things that you’d be able to identify with…?”

“I don’t know… Like, what would I even say to these people? ‘Hi, I’m Roy; I like heroin, boys with gills, playing Robin Hood, and taking long walks on the beach?’ …I don’t suppose they have a group geared towards washed-up former sidekicks, do they…”

“I think I’ve got a monopoly on that field,” Dinah says good-naturedly, then there’s a pause before she adds, “You know, Ollie is—”

“No. God, Dinah, why would you even mention him.”

“He asks me about you all the time.”

“Funny, he never used to ask me about me.”

“Roy, that’s not fair… If you would set your pride aside for just two seconds you would be able to see how much he still cares about you. Look, I know I don’t know what exactly it was that went down between you two, and I am not asking you to tell me, but—”

“Doesn’t Ollie already tell you everything?” Roy asks bitterly.

“He does talk to me about you, yes,” Dinah admits. “But I can’t keep being this… this buffer between the two of you. I don’t want to be caught in the middle like this

,” Roy tells Grace, who is trying to convince him to pick up for her for the third time in a row because she is two hundred dollars in debt to their dealer and he refuses to spot or even sell her any more until she pays up.

“I’ve got the money for this one time,” she presses, “And I’ll’ve paid him all back in like a week and then you won’t have to do this anymore.”

Roy grumbles for another few minutes out of principle but he doesn’t exactly mind scoring for her because he always skims a bit of it and she never seems to notice, and this probably shouldn’t be the only thing he misses when Grace seems to drop off the face of the earth in the following weeks, but it kind of is.

forever.”

Roy is silent.

“Ollie screwed up, and he knows it, too,” Dinah says quietly. “Trust me, he knows. And I’m not asking you to forgive him, just…”

“I’ll talk to him,” Roy promises, a bit desperately. “I will. Just not now, okay? I can’t… Just not now.”

“Okay.”

He purposely steers the conversation towards more benign matters after that, and they chat for a few more minutes before he thanks her awkwardly and says goodbye.

After he hangs up, he uses the mess he’d made as an opportunity to reorganise the contents of his closet, thus providing himself with a valuable distraction, even if he still can’t help but to hope he will find what he’d been looking for.

He does come across something he hadn’t been looking for, though: his old Nintendo Gamecube stashed away at the very back of the upper shelf.

He has absolutely no idea how it had ended up in there, but he could almost sob with joy. It had been missing for so long, he’d figured he’d sold it. Recently he’s been starting to notice the absence of certain items – mostly CDs, books, jewelry or other trinkets – and it’s been disproportionately upsetting. While he doesn’t necessarily miss any of the stuff, he does feel a certain odd regret, one that's not directed towards the actual absence of those things, but rather the shameful reason he’d had to sell them in the first place.

This Nintendo discovery feels like finding a goddamn oasis in the cracked earth of the desert.

(He just needs to keep himself from wistfully remembering how playing video games was one of his favourite things to do when caught in that contented lull.)

He continues his tidying, orders groceries online, has popcorn for dinner and spends the rest of the night making significant progress on Legend Of Zelda: Twilight Princess.

It happens the following day. Day sixteen.

For no real reason other than he feels like it. He's not struggling, he hasn't been triggered, he just... fucking wants some heroin.

That might be the most pathetic part of it all, how thoughtless it is. The most pathetic, and also the scariest, though of course none of this registers at the time, because he’s so good at justifying himself in his head that there’s absolutely none of yesterday’s ridiculous guilt-fueled teeter-tottering.

Today is different because today he has a plan. Everyone seems to think Plans are totally awesome, so they would be so proud of him.

It will be a one time thing. Nowhere near enough to get physically dependent again, which is the key, since really the only reason it was so hard to stop before was because he got sick, right? So with that out of the way, he has nothing to worry about.

He’ll leave the house with not a cent more than the exact amount of money he will need. Go to the Rite Aid that sells singles so that he’ll only have enough rigs for the number of shots he intends to do. He won’t shoot the whole dose at once, will inject half and wait to see how he feels before doing the rest, so that he doesn’t end up one of those poor fucks who OD’s on their first time doing it again because they forgot they don’t have the tolerance they once did.

That part excites him the most. The possibility of it all feeling new again. Towards the end he wasn’t really doing it for any reason other than to keep himself from getting sick; he barely remembers anymore what it’s like to have it actually feel good.

And maybe, just maybe, if he’s very very very lucky, he will get that same incomparable rush as his very first time, the holy high of highs that he spent every subsequent shot hopelessly hoping to reproduce.

He tastes it at the back of his mouth first. Not nearly as acrid as the drips he gets from snorting it, but still noticeable enough to electrify him with the promise of what’s coming next.

And what comes next is absolutely unlike anything he has ever felt.

His breath hitches and his lashes flutter and his heart trips over itself in a contented lurch and he is warm, so warm, safely swathed in a ticklish euphoric glow and somewhere in the distance he can his friends laughing, happy for him, saying “see what we mean?” sweet merciful grace how he does see, he once was blind, so blind, to think that snorting it was as good as it gets, but now how he does see, how he does feel, feels so blissful he almost hurts, the ecstasy of Saint Teresa, zenith sun rapture, invincible, unstoppable, Icarus the brazen, ablazened.

It’s nothing mind-blowingly spectacular or even that special at all, but the comfort and the familiarity are enough to make it worth it.

It feels how he imagines a mother’s embrace would feel, not that he would know.

It feels like coming home.

He wakes up at around five thirty a.m. the next morning and suddenly it doesn’t seem so worth it anymore. He feels physically dirty, like the shame caking his body is actual material filth, skin festering with a mortified regret.

In a way, this disgust is an immense relief. His biggest fear (incidentally also his greatest hope…?) had been that he would end up liking it too much, but in reality it has all proven to have been hugely anticlimactic. That’s useful to know, he muses. He thinks that perhaps his urge to use again had been fueled mostly by curiosity. He’d just wanted to see what would happen, what it would be like, if it was as good as he remembered.

Now in times of weakness he’ll be able to legitimately tell himself that he’s not missing out on much.

Of course he’s not…

This little – ahem – indiscretion has also allowed him to practice a certain restraint that in a way is more difficult to master than complete abstinence. Who knows, maybe one day he’ll even be able to be one of those people who use only once a month or something.

…Ha ha ha.

Still, he remains convinced that this was no big deal, that it was actually a good thing because it proved he has a bit of leeway to slip up without completely backsliding.

Curiosity now satisfied, he has no reason to believe he’ll mess up again. He’ll be fine.

(Still, nobody needs to know.)

He spends the rest of the week fanatically overcompensating by hitting up several different support groups around town. He figures that if he continues along the path he was on as though this never happened, then it won’t even count, won’t even bear mentioning. If anyone asks, he’s still going strong on day sixteen clean.

He finds a group geared towards young people more his age, but feels like such a fraud around these brave, broken creatures whose fucked-up histories and nightmarish home lives gave them every reason to have sought out some numbing agent for the pain. Pain that Roy knows absolutely nothing about, because he’s just this spoiled little shit whose typical adolescent delusion of invulnerability and access to daddy’s money led his experimenting to get a little out of hand, that’s all.

Another youth meeting he attends feels more like a dicksizing competition than a support group, with each person seeming determined to out-do the next with taller tales and deeper battle scars. Roy returns home that afternoon actually feeling more vulnerable, because as terrible as some of those war stories had been, they still stirred up a strange nostalgia in him.

They still seemed like a better alternative to the present.

As one last desperate gesture, he even tries NA despite it seeming kind of cultish and despite his certainty that he is spiritually dead inside. They give him this white keytag that’s supposed to signify ‘surrendering’ to a ‘disease’ over which one is ‘powerless,’ and he stares at it for a long time before he walks out of the room because fuck that, he does have power over this, he has to, otherwise he doesn't have anything.

Kaldur comes over at some point and Roy does not tell him of his little incident, because it doesn’t count. It’s actually a lot easier not talking about it than he thought it would be, especially since trying to teach Kaldur how to play Mario Kart is proving to be a much more impossible task.

“Watch out for that banana…”
“Oops.”
“Get the item box.”
“What does this green shell do?”
“Use it.”
“On whom?”
“I don’t know, anybody!”
“…That was unsuccessful.”
“You were supposed to aim first…”
“The last time I threw a shell, it automatically zeroed in on my opponent.”
“It must’ve been a red shell.”
“Is this a mushroom that I just picked up?”
“Yeah. Use it.”
“I don’t know, your previous suggestion did not turn out so wel—”
“Just use the fucking mushroom!”

Kaldur has also brought with him a scrapbook from Wally and Dick, who have apparently spent a lot of time researching Roy’s – ahem – situation. They’ve printed out the findings and compiled them in a manual of sorts, complete with highlighted key points as well as what must be their own added annontations and suggestions, since Roy is pretty sure that “Always have at least one bag of Oreos in your pantry” has not been clinically proven to help with cravings for anything other than Oreos.

Still, he makes sure to add a couple packs to his virtual shopping cart the next time he buys his online groceries.

He later finds out that the Oreo advice was M’gann’s idea, but approved by Dick and Wally both. At first he thinks he’s infuriated with them for letting the others on the Team know just how bad things had gotten with him; it feels like a betrayal of sorts, like they didn’t care enough to defend his honour by covering for him.

“Oh, Roy,” Dinah says to him sadly when he brings it up on the phone to her one day, “It’s not like that.”

“No?” Roy challenges.

“Of course not. Roy, the reason nobody made excuses for you is because they didn’t think it was something that needed to be hidden. Because they didn’t think it was something to be ashamed of. And it’s not.”

“That's not for them to decide,” Roy growls, hoping the hardened edge in his voice is enough to mask the fact that he’s started to cry, but then he’s starting to laugh, because fuck, has he ever gotten soft.  And it’s okay.

By the end of the week, Roy is absolutely exhausted and has completely lost track of how many meetings he’s gone to; all he knows is that he never wants to have to introduce himself or see the inside of another church, clinic or community centre ever again.

Just as he suspected, he does not play well with others.

And now that he’s finally stopped racing around the city filling his head with other people’s experiences, his own are leaping back into the foreground in full force.

He reluctantly admits all this to Dinah, except for the part about day sixteen, which still doesn’t count.

Dinah suggests individual therapy, particularly with some shrink who she claims was recommended to her by Martian Manhunter, of all people.

“She’s based in New York City,” she tells him over the phone, “But it shouldn’t be too much trouble getting there and back, right?”

“Can you die from over-zeta’ing?” Roy wonders.

“I would say the chances of that happening are very slim.”

“But that’s how J’onn ended up on Earth in the first place, isn’t it? What if I end up on Mars? Or everywhere…! What if my molecules get lost en route and I get sprinkled around the globe?”

“You have never had any reservations about this mode of transportation before, so I think you’re just trying to avoid the subject,” Dinah says bluntly.

“What makes this lady so special anyway?” Roy asks. “If I’m going to teleport coast to coast then it’d better be for good reason.”

“Doesn’t the fact that she counts a Martian as one of her patients say enough?”

“Well, yeah, but it’s not like she would be able to know he’s—”

“He’s not John Jones when he sees her.”

“What…? …Oh. Oh.”

Her name is Claire Foster and her office smells faintly of incense, which, coupled with the miniature zen garden on a table next to the chair where he assumes he is supposed to sit, makes Roy slightly wary.

“This isn’t going to be some new-agey thing, is it?” he asks suspiciously.

Dr. Foster laughs a little. “No, it won’t, don’t worry. I can open the window if the incense is bothering you, though.”

“Nah, I’m okay. But thanks.”

“So. How about we start from the beginning.”

The hell if Roy knows where the fuck that is.

He is sitting cross-legged on his bed staring at a thin folder.

Dr. Foster had given him homework.

He feels like a little kid studying for his first spelling test, except this time the words are in a language he doesn’t speak. And yet, despite seeming completely incomprehensible, it simultaneously manages to also be too laughably simple to be legitimate.

(He also finds it difficult to take the activities seriously because they are mostly written in Comic Sans.)

It’s all just such obvious stuff. Setting goals. Identifying triggers. Planning relapse prevention. Recognising behaviours. Comparing what is and what was and expectation and reality and this and that and that and this and these and those and – well fuck, if everything could be solved by making a fucking pros and cons list then nobody would ever have any problems, would they.

He agrees to see Dr. Foster twice a week as per her suggestion. He notices a pattern of being anxious the entire morning before each visit, then when he returns home there’s a strange nervous sense of relief that actually lasts until he goes to sleep. He fills the days in between with increasingly longer jogs, working on his homework, and talking on the phone with Kaldur and Dinah every now and then. He also discovers the wonderful world of Plants vs. Zombies online.

The nights are the hardest, when it’s just him and his cravings alone in a room that isn’t big enough for the two of them, but he gets by.

One of the first things that Dr. Foster teaches him is that he is going to have to revisit, either mentally or literally, all the places he used to frequent, and learn how to be in them sober. Roy initially thinks this is totally superfluous advice – aside from the more obvious circumstances like a party, shouldn’t being sober be the same regardless of where he is?

The next day, he goes grocery shopping for the first time in the actual supermarket instead of online (daily goal of Running An Errand accomplished! good job, pat on the back, gold star, etc.) and discovers exactly what the doctor had meant.

Just as the timeline of Roy’s day was once dictated by heroin, so too was his mapping of the physical plane. He knew which public washrooms were the easiest to shoot up in, he measured distance by how far he was from a dealer, classified locations by how compatible they were with being high.

For some reason, the grocery store almost topped that list. Or at least it did until he stopped enjoying going anywhere.

The automatic doors part for him like he’s Moses and he

is honeyed and calm and in love with everything, feeling translucent and airy beneath the too-bright fluorescent lights as he drifts up and down the aisles searching for the perfect food to complement his high, like a puff of whipped cream atop a plush warm Belgian waffle. (Incidentally, his food of choice usually does end up being something sweet.) He wonders if the other shoppers can see him glowing, wonders if they’re envious, thinks it’s such a tragedy that never in their lives will they know what it is to feel so luxuriously sound.

steps inside. It is mid-afternoon on a weekday, so the store is not too busy, but there are still enough people milling about to make Roy unbelievably nervous. This is one of the first times he has left the house for something other than his usual walk or jog, but the strangers he passed by then never fazed him because he never felt as though he was intruding in on their world.

Here, he is a blatant trespasser, a dirty fake.

The supermarket is a place where people go to buy food to bring home to make meals, because they are responsible adults who have nice houses and eat things other than ramen noodles and do not spend all of their money on heroin.

Roy is not one of these people. He has no place in their realm.

And they must all know it.

It’s funny, because this never used to be an issue. He used to stalk these very same aisles looking a lot more conspicuously disrespectable than he does right now – hell, towards the end he’s pretty sure he looked like a fucking wreck wherever he went – and it never bothered him in the slightest.

Then again, very little did.

But now… Now he might as well be clad in rags, head carelessly shaved, being marched in a shameful parade through the jeering town like an Allied woman accused of sleeping with German soldiers during the war.

Other people must take one look at Roy and instantly be able to tell how badly he screwed up, will immediately be able to peg him as the piece of shit junkie he is, as obvious as if he had a glaring red A (addict addict addict) stitched onto the front of his shirt. A dripping scarlet emblem of shame that may fade with time but never wash out completely (damn spot).

He can’t help but to have noticed that while recovering alcoholics get ‘sober,’ junkies become ‘clean,’ which just goes to confirm his suspicions that there has always been something about him that is dirty, tainted, just plain wrong. Even now, despite supposedly being 'clean,' he can still feel that wrongness simmering underfoot like magma beneath the mantle, laying in wait for a fissure to form in the earth.

Roy buys bread, bananas, milk, a few frozen dinners, and two boxes of double-stuffed Oreos.

After a few sessions with Dr. Foster, Roy has a complaint to lodge. That being that even though she is thankfully very judicious when it comes to keeping Roy from focusing more on his past mistakes than his current progress, it still means that all they talk about is drugs. He thought the whole point of all this was so he could have a life that wasn’t ruled by drugs. 

But it still is. The fixation has merely switched from doing them to not doing them.

So if he’s going to be thinking about drugs all the time regardless, then he might as well keep doing them. (He does not mention this part.)

Dr. Foster says something about how it is still very early on in his recovery, how at first it will take all of his concentration and focus merely to keep from using, and only after that can he start learning how to truly live without it.

Distractedly, dragging the tiny rake through the sand of the miniature zen garden, Roy wonders when he will reach that stage. If ever. It’s been just over a month – thirty-three days, in fact, if you don’t count the thing that doesn’t count. The logical part of him knows that this is barely any time at all (especially if the thing that doesn’t count ends up being factored in), but the less reasonable yet more overpowering part berates him for not having it under control by now.

Dr. Foster seems to sense his frustration and says gently, “You’re doing fine progress, Roy.”

He smiles uneasily, unsure of whether or not he’s allowed to feel proud of this. His friends have been fawning over him lately, thrilled that he’s been Taking Initiative and Other Responsible Things. He has always thrived on the recognition of his accomplishments, his stubbornness masking an irrepressible eagerness to please, so the approval and support of the others has been a huge motivator, but he doesn’t know if it’s really deserved.

Depending on his mood, he swings back and forth between agreeing that he’s doing a great job with an extremely difficult task, or believing that he’s just exaggerating things in order to draw the praise and admiration that he so desperately strives for.

But regardless of where on this spectrum he finds himself at any given time, at the end of the day, nothing changes the fact that, spectacular feat or not, he simply does not have the same kind of freedom to bask in it in the way that can be done with most other admirable deeds.

This isn’t the kind of thing he can include on a resumé or a portfolio.

When people are making boastful smalltalk about graduating from Harvard or running a marathon or the summer they spent building schools for kids in Ethiopia, he won’t exactly be able to chip in with what has been his most life-changing experience.

No, because his alleged achievement is a dirty, ignoble one, and only exists because he’d been pathetic enough to get hooked in the first place. It’s not a shiny smiling double-sided collector’s penny; lurking on the flip side of this coin will always be a tail of shame that prevents it from being worth anything.

Overcome by a self-indulgent bitterness, he thinks it just seems so unfair, that what he feels is the single most hard-fought accomplishment in his life is one for which he can never be truly lauded.

But who knows, maybe that’s how it should be, and maybe he is obscenely self-seeking to want otherwise. All he’s really doing, after all, is not-doing. He isn’t a ‘survivor’ the way an assault victim or someone in cancer remission is. He’s not some innocent casualty of another person’s crime or of fate’s impersonal cruelty. It’s all his own fucking fault. He fucked up, and now he has to fix it, and that is far from being some formidable gallant deed.

“…and many people don’t even make it this far the first time ‘round,” Dr. Foster’s saying, and Roy jumps a bit because he’s having one of those days where he’s just all out of it and he hadn’t even realised she was still talking.

“The… first time…?” he croaks.

“Achieving long-term recovery on the first attempt is rare,” Dr. Foster admits carefully, “Though not impossible. I don’t want you to get discouraged, or fall into complacency, because it certainly can be done. But should it not, you need to know that that is by no means indicative of failure.”

“This is the second time,” Roy says in a tiny voice.

“…I was under the impression that this was your first time in treatment?”

Roy concentrates hard on pulling the rake across the zen garden, tracing swirling patterns into the sand before sweeping them away again and he mumbles, “Well, yeah, but it’s… It hasn’t really been thirty-three days. Two... three... I don’t know, a few weeks ago, I…”

He trails off and looks up, getting agitated. “B-but it was just one day. Two bags. That was it. That was all. Barely anything. I wasn’t even sick afterwards. And I-I- I didn’t even like it… that much… I can still say it’s been thirty-three days, right? I mean… It didn’t… It wasn’t supposed to count.”

Dr. Foster nods gravely, and Roy is certain that she thinks he is a total failure, even as she’s trying to convince him that while yes, he did slip up, at least he was lucky enough to avoid falling into full-blown relapse, and he should worry less about the actual number of days clean and instead focus on the progression of his recovery. She says he did the right thing by bringing it up with her and pushes him to talk about it so that they can explore what happened and how to prevent it from happening again, and he’s trying to, he swears, but for something that isn’t even supposed to exist, it sure is difficult to address.

It’s humbling almost to the point of humiliation because for the longest time, even as recently as last month, he had somehow been convinced that he wasn’t like other junkies. There was no way he could be. Nothing about him is average, not with the life he’s had, so this would be no different.

Because if it were, it would mean that he was capable of saving the fucking world a thousand times over and yet has always been powerless to help himself.

One of Roy’s main concerns with therapy was that he would have to unearth all sorts of nasty things about himself and his life that he could have done without knowing.

The closet-skeletons. Everyone has them. Nobody wants to deal with them.

Least of all Roy.

This proves to be a misplaced fear, however. For one, it turns out he is already fully aware of each and every one of his own personal shortcomings and character flaws and unhealthy thought processes; it’s not like he needed a degree in psychiatry to identify them.

Furthermore, Roy discovers with a dull surprise that his closets aren’t even that full of skeletons after all.

They’re more just like… slightly ominous dust bunnies.

Dr. Foster has been trying to help him work through the main sources of conflict and anxiety in his life, and here he had been so convinced that the root of his problems lay in some huge suppressed trauma or because daddy never hugged him enough when he was a kid.

He is horrified, and considerably embarrassed, to find that the reality of it all is a lot more banal than that.

The reality is that he simply is not properly equipped to handle real life.

“Sometimes when we have a lot of medium problems, it can seem like too much to handle all at once, so we fall back into one big problem because it’s easier to deal with one thing instead of many,” Dr. Foster explains, and Roy bristles at her simple words, feeling somewhat as though she is talking down to him even though he knows that’s the furthest thing from the truth. “At first, that big problem might not even seem like a problem at all. It might even seem like a solution. But in the end, the cure becomes its own sickness.”

Roy makes a non-committal hmph-ing noise in his throat as he thinks about this for a long time.

It all makes too much sense, even if it’s in that overanalytical head-shrinky way that he continues to stubbornly despise.

It’s a simple factoring equation, really. He had traded in his polynomial wealth of fears, insecurities and sadnesses for a single irreducible all-encompassing focus that made everything else fall away into the background. As long as heroin was in the picture, nothing else was. Focusing on anything else would be as preposterous a prioritising job as asking a firefighter to put out your cigarette when you’re standing inside a burning building.

But heroin isn’t in the picture anymore. At least, not on camera. Instead, it’s always lurking just offscreen, waiting for Roy to forget his lines or miss a cue, which seems inevitable considering he feels like he’s playing every part at once.

“It’s too many things,” Roy mumbles, almost unintelligibly.

They are asking the impossible of him. There’s no way he’ll be able to deal with all of this, not all at the same time. No way he’ll be able to juggle such Herculean tasks as leaving the house and doing the laundry and eating and sleeping normally and finding a way to pay back everyone who’s been helping him with his rent and bills and reconnecting with his sober friends and oh god there are just so many unresolved issues that he has to work out with everyone, particularly Kaldur and Ollie… and he’s somehow supposed to do all of this while also not doing heroin.

Who the hell do they think he is? Superman?

Roy doubts he’s still entitled to call himself a hero in any sense of the word.

“Hello, Oliver.”

There is a pause on the other end of the phone before Ollie’s stunned voice says, “…Roy?”

Roy’s fingers are sweat-slickened and their grip around the receiver is shaky but his words don’t waver when he replies, “It’s been forty five days.”

“Kid, it’s been a hell of a lot longer than forty five days,” Ollie asserts, obviously not getting it.

“No, I mean, it’s been… I’ve been… …f-for forty five days.”

“O-oh,” Ollie stammers. “I… Oh, wow. Roy. That’s… that’s really fantastic.”

Nobody knows what else to say and Roy is puzzled to discover that this conversation isn’t turning out to be nearly as satisfying as it always was when he’d play it out in his head. He’d envision himself returning to Ollie all hardy and self-assured and flourishing, and Ollie would gasp and immediately erupt in a stream of pitiful apologies for ever having doubted Roy’s ability to do this on his own. Or perhaps Ollie would crumple at the sight of him and beg forgiveness for having been so blind, for never picking up on how unhappy Roy had been, and for having turned his back on Roy when Roy had needed him the most.

No matter what the scene, its conclusion always involved Roy scoffing triumphantly as he bitingly declared that he had finally grown up to be the man Ollie had wanted him to be – independent, self-sufficient, and completely unaffected by the lack of a father figure in his life.

What Roy certainly hadn’t imagined was a scenario as simple and subdued as this one, which is soft with an understated sorrow and tremulous in its careful, cautious hope.

They still don’t talk about what happened between them, but when Roy challenges Ollie to a Super Smash Bros. tournament on his Gamecube later that week, Ollie heartily accepts and they both end up winning an equal amount of rounds, which must count for something.

“A love letter?” Roy repeats incredulously.

Dr. Foster nods.

The worst part is how easy it is.

He’d hoped maybe that wouldn’t have been the case, that now, after over two months of no longer peering at the world through tunnel vision no wider than a 30 gauge syringe, he’d be able to see it all from a different perspective. Be able to see it for the evil thing it really was. The thing that had nearly killed him.

But apparently time has healed all the wrong wounds, because he’s found that the longer he’s clean, the harder it gets to remember why he had to stop in the first place, and the more tempting it becomes to go back because it hardly seems to be anything serious anymore. Just as the restless ocean smoothes jagged bottle shards into splendid sea glass, the memory of all the nasty bits seems to become duller as time goes on. The gory days are refined back into the glory days and they moan to him like the bewitching ballad of a siren’s song luring the ships of lovesick sailors into the rocks.

In a way, Roy has indeed always viewed heroin as a lover of sorts. Their relationship had certainly progressed that way. They’d danced in a cautious waltz before Roy tripped over his own feet and promptly tumbled headlong into a dazzling infatuation (after all, one does not merely step into love; one falls) that triggered such changes in him that his friends began to notice (“Wow Roy, I don’t think I’ve ever seen you smile this much in a single day before!”).

Even when infatuation coasted with alarming speed down the slippery slope into obsession, it was still okay, it was fine, he still wanted it, because it felt good.

Nobody else knew how to make Roy feel that good.

Not even Kaldur, Roy had eventually realised with a sick start.

When things eventually began to sour, it was just little hang-ups that Roy barely noticed at the time because he’d acclimate to them without even knowing, so everything just seemed normal.

It seemed normal when, like a possessive partner, heroin began to demand more and more of his time. It seemed normal when it forbade him from seeing his friends and insisted on being with him wherever he went. It even seemed normal that if he tried to leave, he would quickly be put back in his place by a taste of the sheer agony that it promised would await him if they were ever to be apart.

But it was still okay, it was fine, he still wanted it, because it was for his own good.

It’s just because it loves you so much was the justification, and suddenly everything seemed fair, especially since Roy knew this was probably the only thing that ever would love him.

He’s long since learned that beggars can’t be choosers, so he best take what he can get, when and where he can get it.

Nobody else seemed to understand this. That there was no real problem because heroin was good to him.

In an incredibly unwise but not uncharacteristic moment of bad judgment, Roy had once tried to explain all this to Kaldur to show him that it was no big deal. He can’t remember how exactly he had attempted to describe it, and he doesn’t recall actually using the word ‘love,’ but he must have, because Kaldur had shaken his head with disgust and said, “Roy, that is not love, that’s Stockholm Syndrome.”

Roy hadn’t thought much of the comment at the time because he was too frustrated with Kaldur’s inability to grasp what was supposed to be a very simple concept, but now that he revisits it with a slightly clearer mind, he can sort of see where Kaldur was coming from.

From the outside looking in, it must have appeared that Roy had been swept away by a madman whose ultimate goal would be to kill him, but only after having completely crushed him in mind and body both. And yet the kidnapper appeared to do very little to actually prevent Roy’s escape, and Roy never seemed to take advantage of that.

Why doesn’t he just run? everyone would wonder incredulously.

The answer was never because he couldn’t.

It was because he did not want to.

Why should he? Heroin took good care of him. It protected him, kept him safe. When he had heroin, he knew nothing could hurt him, nothing in the world could touch him, except for one single thing, and even if that one single thing was heroin itself, those were still better odds than anything else could offer.

The bottom line was, no matter how bad things may have gotten when they were together, it would surely only get worse if they were to be apart.

Heroin was the only thing Roy has ever been truly loyal to, and in return, it was the only thing that would always, unfailingly and without question, take him back.

Then again, Kaldur had taken him back, too, hadn’t he?

“ Y-y-you came,” Roy stammers, stunned, watery eyes widened in an expression of slightly suspicious disbelief.

Kaldur stares at him, seeming almost horrified that Roy had truly believed Kaldur would have forsaken him. “Roy… Of course I came.”

He looks absolutely shattered. Troubled, Roy wonders how long Kaldur has looked like this, because it’s an exhausted grief etched far too deep to have only appeared overnight, and Roy cannot even begin to imagine how much deeper the emotions themselves must have to run to produce such a lasting rictus of pain.

Pain that Roy has caused him.

Pain that Kaldur could have avoided or at least lessened if only he’d use that infuriatingly pragmatic brain of his and drop out of Roy’s life just like everyone else seems to be doing, one by one.

And yet, here he is.

“Th-thought you… w-were s’pposed to…’ve given up on me,” Roy says bitterly.

“I only gave up on trying to force you to do something that you were clearly not yet prepared to do,” Kaldur replies, sounding anguished. “I finally accepted that you would have to choose it for yourself, so I stopped pushing. But you called me here tonight for a reason, did you not.”

It’s not a question.

“Yes,” is all Roy can say, in a tiny whisper, pulling his blankets tighter around himself as he shudders violently. He clears his throat, sniffles, then adds with slightly more conviction, “I… I’m… ready now. But… it’s gotta be under… m-my terms.”

Skepticism immediately washes over Kaldur’s face. “Forgive me, friend, but… you have not exactly had much, ah, success under your terms, as of yet.”

“Excuse me?” Roy demands irately, though he isn’t sure why he’s even bothering to act outraged seeing as Kaldur is absolutely right.

How many times had he promised himself or someone else that he was cutting down, that this would be his last time, that once he finished this bag he wouldn’t buy anymore, ‘It’s not a problem, I can stop whenever I want’…?

He doesn’t know the answer because it’d happened more often than he cares to admit or even remember.

“It is not that I do not believe you can do it,” Kaldur explains cautiously, going slow and gentle like he’s talking to a spooked horse. “I am simply curious why this time will be any different.”

“B-because I really want to now, I swear,” Roy insists in a voice cracking with desperation, his words bumping into one another as they rush in an increasingly frantic stream from his mouth. “Those other times I wasn’t serious, I was just… I-I… I didn’t actually want to do it, I was just saying that to get everyone to stop bugging me about it and wasn’t really trying, but now… n-now I swear I… God, Kal, I’ll do anything not to have to be like this anymore…”

“Oh, Roy,” Kaldur sighs sadly, coming to take a seat next to Roy on the couch. His eyes seem misty but Roy can’t tell if it’s because Kaldur is crying or because everything is misty right now in Roy’s bleary vision.

“So what are these terms you were considering?” Kaldur asks after a moment, trying to keep the ball rolling.

Roy takes a deep breath that quivers like a beaten drumhead when he exhales it.

“No inpatient,” he says listlessly, as though he’s reciting a poem he doesn’t care for. “No twelve steps. N-no methadone or… or suboxone, or whatever.”

Kaldur looks apprehensive. “Er, perhaps it might be wiser to consider a medically assisted withdr—”

“No. Cold turkey. Gotta… do this on m-my own. And it needs to be hell e-n-nough for me to… t’never want to go through it again.”

“Roy, even with aid I am sure that it will be—”

“No.”

“All right,” Kaldur accedes helplessly. “So what do we do first?”

“Well, um, I got a good few days of shaking and puking t’do before anything can r-really happen,” Roy replies with a bleak smile, choosing not to address Kaldur’s actual question because quite frankly, he has absolutely no idea. Pause. Then: “And… there’s one more thing.”

Kaldur simply fixes him with a patient, expectant stare and Roy feels his heart bottom out as though it had fallen through a trapdoor. Maybe he won’t be able to do it.

But he must.

“You can’t be there,” he says finally.

Kaldur looks confused. “I… I do not understand.”

“You got water in your ears?” Roy snaps, his shame suddenly manifesting itself as savagery. “You h-heard me. You can’t be here. It’s as simple as that. After this whole little… heart-to-heart… you are going t-t-t…-to walk out that door ‘n… and not come back until I say you can.”

“But Roy…”

“You don’t get it,” Roy shouts frustratedly, regretting the words even before they’ve come out of his mouth, because of course it isn’t Kaldur’s fault that he doesn’t understand, and it certainly isn’t from lack of trying, either. He’s always tried the best he knows how to. But Roy wouldn’t want him to understand, hopes that Kaldur won’t ever even come close enough to this kind of pain to know it well enough to demystify it.

Fumbling to explain himself as a way of apologising, Roy says defeatedly, “I just can’t let you see me like that, okay? Like… like this. You think you’ve already seen me at… at m-my w-w-worst? …You haven’t seen shit. And I won’t let you.”

Kaldur gives a thoughtful nod, and Roy almost wants to lunge forward and shake him by those strong, inked shoulders, because the way he’s acting just isn’t natural. He should be yelling at Roy or hitting him or pitying him or walking out on him. Anything but treating him like someone who can be trusted to make the right choices on their own.

Treating him the way, Roy realises, that he has always claimed he wanted to be treated, but had never quite earned, and now that he’s somewhat obtained it, he wishes he could give it all back. Somehow he had neglected to remember that being trusted to make the right choices involves knowing what those choices are and actually acting on them, not to mention taking responsibility for the ensuing consequences.

Wildly, Roy thinks he probably preferred being a kid always being told what to do – by his teachers, by the law, by whoever was supposed to know better than him. It’s funny, though, because back then, all he could think was Just you wait until I’m old enough to get out from under your thumb… I’ll be able to do WHATEVER I WANT!!!!, but now that he’s actually acquired that freedom, he has no idea what to do with it.

He has no idea what to do with anything, really.

“I will let you have as much space as you desire,” Kaldur promises. “But here are my terms. You say you really want this? Then it starts now. Not later tonight, not tomorrow, not after ‘one last shot.’ Right. Now. And I will not allow you to stay here alone.”

“Fine,” Roy sighs, too exhausted to fight anymore. “Whatever. G-good luck… tr-trying to find some… mmm… mm’one who wants to b-b-babysit a belligerent junkie during withdrawal.”

“Actually… I have already spoken to Black Canary.”

“I can’t do it,” Roy tells Dr. Foster.

She seems puzzled.

“Forgive my presumptiousness,” she says, “But I would have thought this might’ve been one of the easier exercises.”

“Exactly,” Roy says miserably. “It’s really really easy. Easier, I realised, than… th-than if I were writing a letter to… Kaldur.”

“Does this bother you?”

“Well, yeah…!  He’s my… I mean, I love him. I really do.”

Roy’s voice cracks and he takes a minute to rake a few zigzags in the zen garden sand but when he tries to speak again the words still don’t come out with much confidence.

“I love him so much,” he says brokenly. “But… this has made me realise that I love… loved…? I love… -d… heroin more.”

He never imagined that the verb tenses of the English language could cause him so much grief.

How much time has to transpire before he’s allowed to refer to things in past tense? When does this become a little blip in his character instead of its default setting? When can he say with a dismissive shrug, Oh yeah, I had a bit of a problem a long time ago but I’m better now, and everyone will nod appreciatively and agree Yes, so glad that’s over and done with…?

It’s never going to be over.

“As we discussed on Monday,” Dr. Foster says, “The purpose of this exercise was to try to pinpoint exactly what you got out of using. So, essentially, what you loved the most about it, or at least thought you loved the most. Then we can see how this matches up with what the drug actually provided you, and hopefully it will become clear that using was an ineffective and unhealthy way to go about trying to fulfill these needs.”

“I think you’re overcomplicating things,” Roy objects. “I get high because I like how it feels. That’s it. I was never looking to fill some 'void' inside me, wasn’t trying to numb any kind of pain, or anything like that. I did it because it made me feel good. End of story.”

This isn’t totally a lie, but is far from being the end of story and it flagrantly omits just about everything he’s been thinking about during the past couple of days, particularly his nauseating recognition of how Kaldur has always come in second to heroin in just about every aspect of Roy’s heart, mind, and body. There had been a few months in the heady beginning of their relationship when Roy’s drug use was still in the experimenting phase and Kaldur was his one and only, but it hadn’t been long before heroin pulled ahead to steal the show.

Kaldur may technically have been there first, but it was only heroin that could claim the dubious honour of having Roy’s undying commitment.

“All right, then let’s stick with this ‘feeling good,’” Dr. Foster says. “Certainly there are less damaging ways to feel good.”

“Not that good.”

“No, probably not,” Dr. Foster agrees, “And that is something you will have to learn to accept. But there are always alternatives.”

“I lied,” Roy says suddenly.

“I… I beg your pardon?”

“I lied when I said it was only about feeling good,” Roy clarifies, without really knowing why he’s suddenly being so honest.

It’s probably the guilt.

“So there are other factors,” Dr. Foster says, nodding as though she knew it all along, which she probably did, and Roy feels unnecessarily insulted by this.

“I don’t really know how to describe it. But it’s funny that you came up with this love letter thing, ‘cause… because that’s really exactly what it is. …What it was. I really did feel like I was in a fucking relationship with… with… …it.”

“Could it have been because you were unsatisfied with the real relationships in your life?”

“No,” Roy says automatically, because he doesn’t want to talk about Ollie. He’s not even sure he’s even entitled to complain about the way things were with Ollie, whether before this whole mess, or during, or after.

Ollie wasn’t his father. The kind of relationship Ollie intended them to have had been clear from the outset, and it wasn’t his fault that Roy ignored those boundaries and insisted on wanting something more, something that was never up for grabs in the first place.

Even the way Ollie had reacted when he found out about Roy’s little – ahem – habit hadn’t been too outrageously out of line, really. As expected, he’d shouted and raged and stomped (though Roy would argue that it was more of a flounce), but Roy was eighteen, a legal adult, he was living on his own, and there was nothing Ollie could do.

So do nothing Ollie did.

He removed himself from Roy’s life in every possible way. Physically, emotionally, even financially.

Roy understands now that this was something of a ‘tough love’ approach, but it had felt the furthest thing from loving at the time, and even now the resentment has yet to fully fade away.

Rabid with spite in the weeks after Ollie had essentially abandoned him, Roy had often entertained the possibility of Ollie one day being called in to ID his body, blue-lipped and toe-tagged, grey and cold and having the last laugh on a stainless steel slab in the Star City morgue.

“I was a little lonely at the time,” Roy admits in what is possibly the understatement of the century. “But it wasn’t because my relationships weren’t working out, or anything… And it was my own fault, really, for being so set on going solo. But I had really good people in my life, in general. Actually, I still do. Somehow.”

Roy trails off and Dr. Foster merely nods, which leads to a brief silence that Roy finds extremely uncomfortable. He’s never been someone who feels the need to blurt out the first thing to come to his mind the second everyone else stops talking just to break the silence – especially not since any lull was likely the result of one of his own one-word answers completely killing the entire conversation.

Silences in therapy, however, are an entirely different story.

Despite the incense and the zen garden and the feng shui’d furniture, his brain is always in hyper-stressed overdrive when he’s sitting in this room, and there’s only one way to keep himself from being split apart by the sheer velocity of the thoughts ricocheting about in his skull: lessening the pressure by constantly releasing these thoughts in the form of words. Talk talk talk, always talk, talk faster than you can think, because saying one stupid thing is not nearly as disastrous as allowing your brain enough time to conjure up some horrid idea that will fester inside you for days to come.

“This sounds so dysfunctional and codependent,” Roy begins awkwardly, feeling slightly mortified but trying to rein in this particular thought before it has the chance to develop a parasitic life of its own, “But one of my w-worst fears has always been that… that sometimes love just isn’t enough. Because, see, in the beginning, I used to think… I could get all those wonderful feelings that I got from heroin, if only… if I could just find someone who would love me. Really love me. And someone who… who I could love, too. I thought that if I had that, maybe I wouldn’t need heroin anymore.”

“You have several people in your life who probably fit that bill,” Dr. Foster notes.

“Yeah, I do,” Roy chokes out. “Hell, Kaldur was in my life that entire time. And I know he thought the same thing, too… We were both such desperate believers of that whole ‘love conquers all’ thing, so you’d think that with our combined efforts, then… well, something should have happened, right? And that’s how I learned that love can’t do shit. Because if it were really the cure, I’d’ve been healed by now.”

What Kaldur doesn’t understand is that it’s not about him.

Roy would think that Kaldur, being the rational and insightful individual that he is, would have long since learned this. Roy doesn’t know how to explain to him that this is by no means the result of some deficiency on Kaldur’s part, nor is it any negative indication of Roy’s love for him.

Love has nothing to do with it.

It’s not you, it’s me heroin.

But no, Kaldur does not understand this, because he still believes he can fix everything, and he’s in tears and clutching both of Roy’s wrists in a desperate grip and he’s asking all these stupid questions and Roy kind of wants to laugh at how disgustingly melodramatic this scene is, but mostly he just wishes Kaldur would stop crying.

“Kaldur, please,” Roy’s saying vacuously. “Kaldur. It’s okay. Jesus, Kaldur.”

Kaldur can’t stop shaking his head and repeating, “Then just stop. You say you can stop if you want to, so stop.”

“But I don’t want to,” is Roy’s petulant and predictable reply.

“Why not?”

Roy thinks the answer is obvious but decides to humour Kaldur anyway. “Why should I? It’s fun, it feels good, and I’m safe about it. I’ve got it under control. When it starts to get bad, of course I’ll stop.”

“What if I told you it has already started being bad for us – for those who love you?”

Roy is silent. This is probably a trick question.

“Can’t you try to stop because I want you to? Because your friends and family want you to? Is that not reason enough?”

Kaldur looks so earnest and sad and even hopeful, and Roy feels a strange blend of pity and disdain towards the fact that Kaldur, his poor trusting ingenuous Kaldur, actually believes it can be that simple.

Well, if he’s trying to play the if you loved me, you would card, then he better prepare himself for the disappointment of the millenium.

Roy can only hope that Kaldur won’t also try to give him the it’s either me or the drugs ultimatum that seems to be such another common yet exceptionally ineffective tactic among people who obviously have no idea what they’re talking about, because if they did, they would know better than to think these kinds of threats were the the best solution.

It isn’t even that late into his addiction yet, but Roy knows right then that if given the choice, he will opt for the drugs, every time, regardless of what or who the other contender is.

How can he make Kaldur understand? That it has nothing to do with loving Kaldur any less, and everything to do with needing the heroin more.

“Can’t you do that?” Kaldur’s still saying, getting agitated, and oh god, Roy realises, he’s practically begging now. “Can you not stop… for us? For your family?”

“That’s not how it works,” Roy replies with a bleak, miserable smile.

“So… You are saying that our love - my love - it means nothing to you.”

The hurt bewilderment in Kaldur’s eyes makes Roy want to gouge out his own but he just stares down at Kaldur’s dolphin-sleek hands that are still wrapped around his wrists, and he repeats, “That’s just not how it works.”

Dr. Foster sends him home urging him to give the assignment one last try, but not to push himself so hard that he ends up in a bad place.

Sitting at his desk, eyes blank as the sheet of lined paper he’s staring at, Roy feels very fragile in a way that he hasn’t felt in a very long time – or hasn’t let himself feel. It’s an odd breed of frailty that he can’t quite put his finger on; one that makes him feel more vulnerable about hurting other people than the other way around.

Suddenly all the guilt and shame and regret he should have been feeling when he had been hurting everyone he knew is finally hitting him in full force, and is compounded even further by the knowledge that he’d felt very little of it at the time. That when he was lying and stealing and manipulating and cheating, he’d barely given it a second thought.

Doodling little frogs in the margin of the paper, he thinks back to what Kaldur had said the afternoon after Roy walked out of his first group meeting - how he had dreaded every phone call because he thought it would be someone calling to tell him that Roy was dead.

It hadn’t been the first time he’d told Roy something along those lines. In the desperate days toward the end, it had become a recurring theme, not only from Kaldur, but nearly everyone. The people who loved him were coming to him and essentially begging him to stop, using death as their main selling point.

They were clever about it, too. They didn’t bother warning Roy that he was going to die if he kept this up, because he was obviously way past caring about what happened to him. So instead of trying to scare Roy into wanting to live for his own sake, they attempted to guilt Roy into not wanting to die, for someone else’s sake.

They had clearly grossly overestimated Roy’s capacity to care by that point, as well as failed to pick up on Roy’s newfound misgivings of the concept of having a reason to live that does not directly involve oneself.

Kaldur had tried so hard to be that reason.

Roy had scarcely acknowledged those efforts.

Thinking back to that time now, it seems impossible that Roy couldn’t have realised the sheer hell he was putting his loved ones through day after day. It was such a ridiculously self-evident reality, and he had no fucking excuse for ignoring it. God… had he really been so sick that he hadn’t been able to see it? Or worse, had he in fact seen it all, but was simply too sick to care?

And not sick as in ill, but sick as in sickening, a wretched excuse for a human being.

…Right?

Some of the people in the support groups he’d so valiantly attempted to participate in were pretty big on the ‘addiction is a disease’ model, which Roy finds to be a totally acceptable angle when applied to anyone else, but somehow when applied to himself, it seems more like an excuse. 

Ollie had once accused him of being self-absorbed for the way he would always hold himself to different standards than everyone else, as though he thought the average standards weren’t good enough for him.

But the truth is the opposite. Roy only sets these ridiculously demanding expectations not because he looks down on the rest of the world, but because he looks down on himself.

He sees himself as so much less than everyone else, which means he has to work like hell to make up for it. His very best is barely enough to scrape the rest of the world’s average, so he has to constantly be on top of his game if he wants to be able to keep up.

He feels silly for this. He should have been over these petty self-esteem issues a long time ago. Then again, his hang-ups with himself extend far beyond the usual adolescent scope of bad skin or not having a hot swimsuit bod. What is wrong with him can’t be fixed by a couple tips in Men’s Health magazine or writing down one positive thought about himself a day. Because what is wrong with him is just… him. He is the wrong part.

Roy also has one more concern about the ‘disease’ theory. He thinks it has the potential to be very dangerous. After all, if it is indeed a ‘disease,’ and thus not Roy’s ‘fault,’ then doesn’t that technically mean it’s not Roy’s responsibility, either? Well, how excellent! Roy can now spend the rest of his days gliding around in total complacency, not even bothering to try - oh please don’t be mad at me for relapsing, it simply cannot be helped, you see!

Roy gives himself a mental slap across the face. He can’t afford to think that way right now.

He looks down at the doodled frogs that have colonised the margins of his otherwise untouched sheet of paper, wondering how he could possibly make things right, then he puts down his pen and picks up the phone.

It goes to Kaldur’s voicemail.

Roy considers contacting Kaldur by comm link as Kaldur had urged him to do in an emergency, but it’s certainly nothing dire, and Kaldur must be on a mission or something if he’s not picking up. After all, he does have a life outside of scraping Roy off the floor.

A life that Roy used to have, too.

For the first time in longer than he can remember, his hands itch not for the patient pressure of pushing a plunger, but for the taut, measured resistance of drawing a bow.

All the literature seems to advise against becoming involved in serious relationships for even as long as a year while first getting clean. Roy wonders how long a break they would suggest before trying to get back into the superhero business, but then again, he’s not exactly locking himself up in a monastery so he supposes he wouldn’t heed their suggestions for anything else, either.

“I never got to thank you,” he says quietly to Kaldur over Star City’s best gelato, having spent all week haunted by the love letter exercise that he has continued to refuse to touch.

Kaldur nods. “And I never got to apologise.”

Roy looks up from his little cup of cioccolato to stare at Kaldur in disbelief as he demands, “To me? What the fuck for?”

“I was so angry at you for having chosen Black Canary,” Kaldur admits, looking embarrassed. “For letting her take care of you and help you in the way I had wanted and tried so hard to do.”

Roy swallows hard, remembering Dinah’s hands, how firm and strong they were as she’d tried to knead the pure agony out of his cramping legs, and yet also so gentle every time she’d slide a cool washcloth across his clammy forehead, murmuring you’re doing so well, it’ll all be over soon.

What if it had been Kaldur instead? His touch, regardless of where his hands may roam on Roy’s body, is one of the most comforting sensations Roy has ever known, aside from the tight embrace of a tourniquet, but of course he’s not supposed to think about that now.

One thing’s for sure, though: having Kaldur around certainly would have helped with the odd fact that jerking off had been practically the only thing that could give Roy any measure of relief… Plus he could have avoided the utter mortification of needing Dinah to replace the sheets every few hours during the first couple of days, because Roy’s body had been so fucking hypersensitive that even just rubbing against the bed the wrong way was sometimes enough to make him come. And considering he’d been so fucking restless and agitated, so maddeningly incapable of staying still, it had happened much more often than he’d care to admit.

But Roy also remembers what other illustrious and dignified tasks Kaldur would have been responsible for if he’d been in Dinah’s place, like emptying buckets of puke or mopping shit off the bathroom floor. He remembers how upset Dinah had been when, even once the worst of the physical symptoms had ostensibly subsided, he still hadn’t been able to get out of bed. Not because he was sick, but because a thick cocoon of sadness had spooled around him and simply refused to let him go.

She had been so fucking concerned even though, technically, she did not even love him. She genuinely cared about him, he had no doubt about that, but that didn’t change the fact that he was a virtual stranger, just this dumb kid who her dumb boyfriend had taken in and then thrown out again.

So if Roy had managed to worry Dinah so badly without even meaning that much to her, he knows it would have absolutely torn Kaldur apart.

“Fuck, Kaldur,” Roy says miserably. “Don’t even think you need to apologise for that. And it’s not that I didn’t want you to help. I just… I couldn’t bear to let you see me like that, you know? I couldn’t. Dinah was… she was close enough that I trusted her, but not so close that I was afraid of what she might think of me, or– or afraid of losing her if she ended up totally hating me by the time it was all over… Not like how I was afraid of losing… you.”

Come to think of it, it’s nothing short of a miracle that it hadn’t caused Roy to lose Dinah. To the contrary, by the end of that week, they’d forged an actual relationship, and though it may have started off horribly one-sided, Roy somehow knew that it would last long enough for him to pay her back. Somehow. He still has yet to thank her properly. As though mere words could ever be enough.

One thing at a time, though.

Meanwhile, Kaldur is just staring at him, appearing to be having difficulties processing what Roy had just said.

Probably because as recently as a month and a half ago he was thoroughly incapable of expressing such a sentiment to another human being.

Or any sentiment, really.

Kaldur is probably wondering if Roy has been replaced by some kind of android, because even an inorganic life form would probably have a higher emotional IQ.

“May I ask you a question?” Kaldur eventually inquires after a long silence, and Roy immediately gets nervous.

He hates it when people start questions off with ‘can I ask you a question’ because it’s not like he can really answer if he doesn’t fucking know what the actual question is. One thing he does know, though, is that ‘can I ask you a question’ always, inevitably means that the ensuing question is tough enough that you might want to reply ‘No, fuck you, you can’t ask me anything,’ except of course nobody ever says that.

Roy nods wordlessly, because there’s not really anything else he can do.

“I need to know,” Kaldur begins falteringly, “That if anything happened… between us… it would not, ah, trigger” – ugh there’s that fucking word again – “any, um, regression, in your recovery.”

Roy feels dizzy all of a sudden.

“Are you… breaking up with me?” he asks, trying to sound cutting instead of absolutely terrified.

He hasn’t told anyone, not even Dr. Foster, but he worries that everything is changing too quickly and all at once, although to be fair, not all of the changes have been bad. For instance, it is kind of nice to be woken up in the morning by his own biological clock and not because his stomach is turning itself inside out for his next fix.

But all these changes could also mean he is too different for Kaldur’s feelings for him to survive. After all, when their relationship started, Roy had already been using, and by the time Kaldur actually fell in love with him, he was practically high all the time – still functional, still superhero’ing it up, but still always high. The Roy Harper that Kaldur fell in love with was the Roy Harper who stole fluttering kisses on street corners and knew how to let things go and laughed without also curling his lips in disdain.

It was not this Roy Harper.

Meaning they have to start all over again, timid and careful, like fumbling hands feeling their way in the dark through a vaguely familiar room. The glass half-full crowd would call this a second chance, but to Roy it feels too much like starting from scratch after having lost everything. Like a brain-damaged accident victim relearning how to tie his shoes and use a fork, Roy has had to reprogram his whole life and rewire his brain’s entire circuitry, and maybe there’s just not enough of his old self left for Kaldur to still feel the same way about him.

…Or maybe there is, because right now Kaldur is wide-eyed and horrified and exclaiming, “No, of course not!” and Roy is actually taken aback by how forcefully the words were uttered.

“Of course not,” Kaldur repeats after having composed himself. “I simply wished to know if I would be any kind of… hindrance.”

“Kaldur,” Roy breathes. “You could never… God, Kaldur.”

He desperately tries to figure out how he can convince Kaldur of just how beneficial his presence has been; Roy has not exactly had the best track record when it comes to proving he knows what’s best for himself.

Is this any different, though? Maybe Kaldur is right. He certainly isn’t a hindrance right now, but that’s because he’s here. So if his presence is good for Roy, then by definition, his departure would be quite bad indeed. He might not be breaking up with Roy at this particular moment, but the fact that he’s even brought it up is making Roy nauseous, so if it actually ended up happening, who’s to say that he wouldn’t deal with it in the only way he knows how to?

As in, not very well, or arguably not at all.

Roy is loath to consider the fact that he needs Kaldur around, because he doesn’t, he shouldn’t, he can’t, because it’s selfish and fucked-up and not enough in the long run.

“What if I said yes?” he asks suddenly.

Kaldur frowns, confused. “…To what?”

“To… if I’d fuck up again if… something happened. What difference would it make if I would? You seem like you’re scared I’m going to start back up again if you, like, leave or something, so, what, you’re going to prevent that by… leaving?”

“That is not what I meant,” Kaldur says sharply.

“I’m sorry,” Roy murmurs, squeezing his eyes shut, hating how he always gets like this. “I didn’t mean it, either. Because I’d totally understand if that’s what you wanted.”

“That is the last thing I want.”

“Huh. You have got to be either the most patient or most masochistic person I know.”

“I believe it has already been established that you play that latter role,” Kaldur replies, mouth quirked into a cheeky grin, because he knows that he’s right, even if he and Roy aren’t exactly talking about the same thing anymore.

Roy gives a slightly wild laugh, relieved to have gotten out of the original conversation they’d been having, and he reaches across the table to gently touch one of Kaldur’s hands before quickly drawing away again before anyone could see.

He remembers his own hands, three days ago, picking up his old recurve bow, the only one of his old weapons that hadn’t been sold, and he’d gone training with Ollie for the first time in months. He was rusty, of course, and even though he wasn’t so out of touch that he’d required assistance, Ollie had nevertheless stood behind him and closed his hand around Roy’s as he drew

the plunger back, almost shivering in relief when deep red blood swirled up into the barrel, and he released the end of the tourniquet that had been clenched between his teeth, praying his shaking hands wouldn’t knock the needle right out of the vein before he could properly slam the shot

his bowstring, and Roy could have been all of fourteen years old again, Ollie adjusting his grip and his posture, Roy trying not to tremble beneath the sturdy hands of the man he’d called his hero for so long.

“I want to get out there again,” Roy says abruptly. “You know. Back in the field.” He hesitates, swallows, then adds, “It’s the only thing I’m good at. Plus, I’ve been working out every day, because exercise is supposed to be really good for… I mean, it’s supposed to be helpful. I wouldn’t come back ‘til I’ve brushed up a bit, of course, and I, um, will probably need to get some new equipment first, but I practiced with Ollie a few days ago and it all came back to me pretty quickly.”

Kaldur is silent for a long time, trying to decide how to respond.

Roy gets impatient, feels that vicious frustration beginning to bloom in his chest, and he spits out, “You may be the Team’s leader but it’s not like I need your permission to keep fighting the good fight.”

“I simply think you are already fighting a hard enough battle as it is, my friend,” Kaldur says at last.

His voice is sad and sincere and Roy sighs and can’t bring himself to argue, only mumbles, “It’d just be nice to fight one I could win for once, that’s all.”

The sadness begins as an occasional tickle.

Roy will be going about his little daily activities as usual when without warning it’ll seem as though all the oxygen has been sucked out of the room and his heart suddenly weighs a hundred pounds. It hits him once when he’s brushing his teeth in the morning. While he’s doing the dishes. Again as he’s browsing the Internet for new archery gear.

And then as quickly as it descends, it’s gone.

This goes on for several days, and it lingers longer and longer until finally it stops bothering to leave and just takes up permanent residence.

Roy doesn’t know what’s going on because he’d been doing everything right.

He’d even felt good for a little while.

Maybe feeling good had been more exertion than he’d thought, and all that work, all those days of either consciously or unconsciously warring with himself, maybe it's all finally beginning to take its toll.

He needs a break from all this fighting.

He sees Dr. Foster that Monday, smiling brightly as he declares he wants to cut their sessions down to once a week because he’s been doing so well, and he starts to disappear again.

His sleeping patterns may have finally begun to sort themselves out, but it just gives him more time to dream.

Mostly they’re nightmares, full of monstruous, lashing terror, including a recurring one in which he’s on his way home after having scored when he gets picked up by the cops, and the sheer guilty panic that lances through his dream-self is often intense enough to wake his real self.

For some reason, he never seems to make it far enough into the dream to see himself actually getting high.

It’s always just the hunt. Frantic four a.m. emergency calls to dealers. Having to wait endless agonising hours for someone’s ‘guy’ to come by. The closest he’s come to actually using was one nightmare where he had everything prepped but could not find a single vein on his entire body.

Regardless of whatever happens in these dreams, they are always so incredibly vivid, so horrifyingly realistic, that one morning he has to check his phone just to make sure there aren’t any dealers’ numbers in his calling history.

(There is one, though it’s not from any of these recent nights. It’s from way back on day sixteen, after that first slip-up. The one that didn’t count.)

He knows even before he sets off on it that this next bout will count.

It will count a lot.

Lazarus, someone whispers into his ear, Hey Lazarus, I’ve come to take you back.

It happens on day seventy-two.

For no real reason other than he’s just so tired of fighting it – of fighting himself – during his every waking and sleeping moment.

Easier to just give in.

He’s not even looking to get high, really; he just wants to be able to stop fucking obsessing over it all day. He feels like he’s split in two, devil and angel on either shoulder, and their bickering is so loud, such a racuous and constant cacaphony, that he will do absolutely anything to silence it.

His body is so jacked with anticipation that he dry-heaves into the kitchen sink after getting off the phone with his dealer.

Silence. Soon he will have silence.

He preps his first fix with a mindful deliberation that borders on tenderness. It’s the good stuff, the powder that doesn’t need heat or an acidic agent to dissolve (just add water!), and he sighs contentedly as he watches it melt away. Normally he would’ve been too sick and desperate to relish this loving ritual that is pretty much akin to the best foreplay ever, so it really is a treat to be able to fully enjoy it the way he used to when he’d first started IV’ing.

The death-squeeze of the tourniquet, the taste of rubber between his teeth. The way his veins bloom like something coming to life, and in a way perhaps they have, resurfacing after having been granted a break from being treated as a pincushion. His old track marks have all but faded, a few faint ropey scars the only evidence of what his body had been subjected to for so long.

As he draws up his shot, he thinks perhaps he should’ve prepared a slightly smaller one, considering this his the first time using after a long-ish break, but he’s careful, he injects only half at first (he’s seeing stars, he is no longer corporeal, no longer an organic creature, he is pure light, his insides bubbling galaxies of warmth), waits a little, then, after seeing that he has not keeled over dead, he slams the rest.

Pierce, register, relapselease.

Hours later, he’s feeling a bit fucked-out, skin prickling slightly with that familiar guilt, but his high had been a fucking good one and, just as importantly, the once incessant whirring of that eternal internal debate has finally subsided.

Silence at last.

That really wasn’t so bad, he thinks to himself.

He thinks, Hey, I can totally do this.

After all, when he first started, he had remained relatively functional for a long time, even after taking the irreversible plunge from snorting to shooting. He had impressed himself with how long he was able to get away with it, really. Because just like pretty much every other kid in the country, he’d been taught that heroin was the absolute worst of the worst, that you try it once and the next thing you know, you’re some slobbering degenerate living in a cardboard box and shooting puddle water between your toes.

Roy had been delighted to learn that this was all totally, glaringly false. It must have been conceived by the very same liars who’d come up with the equally erroneous claim that nobody would like him when he was high.

He’d met people who really did only use on weekends. People who had never even touched a needle. He even met practically full-blown IV junkies with nine-to-five jobs, junkies who were full-time law students, junkies whose parents never knew about their habit.

And he had discovered that he too could walk among their invisible ranks.

For a while, at least.

Seeing as he’d been so convinced that he wouldn’t be like other junkies, he’s absolutely mortified by just how typical the progression of his little sob story is.

Set off by pure curiosity, just using socially or on weekends (it’s okay because he’s only snorting it and never ever ever will he start injecting, that’s for addicts, you see) …ah what the hell, maybe he’ll try it just once—HOLY FUCKING SHIT IS THIS WHAT HE’S BEEN MISSING OUT ON ALL THIS TIME?! all right, only a couple days a week then, never more than three days in a row, and always with at least a seventy-two hour gap betwee– oh, oops.

Sometimes he wonders if it would’ve gotten as bad as it did if he hadn’t had all those thousands of dollars of his dead parents’ money sitting in the bank, just waiting for him to spend it all, not to mention the generous allowance he'd get from Ollie. Maybe without that little safety net, he wouldn’t have been able to take such a deep and drastic dive; he would have had no other choice but to be frugal.

Instead, he’d let himself go nuts.

It was fine, he was having fun, he was feeling good, and it’s not like he was some junkie pawning off family heirlooms… it’s not like the money would actually run out.

It did.

(Poor little rich boy.)

But this time, he swears, it will be different, and not like all those other times he said it would be different but it actually wasn’t.

Hadn't he already proven that he is in fact capable of using responsibly (or as responsibly as a Schedule I controlled substance can be used)? Yes. He had. He’d demonstrated this both during his one-day slip up as well as in the beginning of his experimenting.

And he would demonstrate it again now.

This time would be different, because this time, he doesn’t have all that money lying around, doesn’t have the luxury of being able to buy enough to develop a real habit. He’ll have to take it slow. He won’t have a choice, seeing as the only income he’s got at the moment is from taking on degradingly menial jobs for acquaintances or friends-of-friends who have no doubt been goaded into it by someone or other, probably Dinah, maybe Ollie.

Therefore, he better make sure this gram he just bought lasts him a while, but that shouldn’t be a problem at all, since he’s not going to use more than a bag or two a day and will take a three-day break after every three days of using.

Which he admits sounds like a suspiciously familiar plan but it will work this time, he swears.

T minus 30 days.

In a month, Roy has decided resolutely, he will be clean.

He knows this for sure because he has thought it through very well, with a meticulousness to rival Batman’s. He’s figured out how much and how often he needs to use to keep himself from getting sick, so he’ll use that as a starting point when he calculates how much dope in total he'll need to get him through the upcoming four weeks, with the amount he uses decreasing by a bag every few days.

It’s a good plan, he thinks, feeling rather pleased with himself, and he can’t believe he hadn’t thought of it sooner. He’s never been able to last longer than three days when trying to kick cold turkey, but now that he’s tapering off, it should be a piece of cake.

*

T minus 25 days.

Hmm, maybe he’s going too quickly. Gotta slow down a bit.

He’ll dip into tomorrow’s allotted supply and just use a little less in the days to come, that’s all.

*

T minus 24 days.

Oops – he was supposed to be doing less to make up for the deficit caused by yesterday’s slight overindulgence, wasn’t he?

It’s okay, he’ll even things out in the upcoming week.

*

T minus 19 days.

All the heroin is gone.

He gets more.

Four days later.

All the heroin is gone.

He gets more.

When Roy had first started using regularly, it would take him at least a week of daily use to develop a dependency strong enough to produce withdrawals after he stopped, and even those were next to nothing in the beginning.

He remembers being unexpectedly whisked off on a three-day-long mission after having snorted at least once a day all week, and he’d been restless and a bit nauseous and just generally out of sorts, but it was so mild that nobody even noticed.

He had returned home afterwards, thinking That was it…?

So he’s not too nervous when he runs out of dope the following week, and he figures this would be a good time to take a break. He could feel his tolerance building anyway, and he would hate to reach the point where he can’t even feel it anymore.

He acknowledges the fact that he’s in for a pretty uncomfortable weekend, but by no means will he be incapacitated. He’ll just take it easy, and even if he’s not one hundred percent yet on Monday, he should still be able to manage seeing Dr. Foster.

After all, according to his scientific calculations, if it took him over a week of using to get hooked in the beginning, then only a week of using, especially after months of abstinence, should be like starting all over again. The withdrawal at Dinah’s was only so excruciating because by that point he had been shooting up several times a day, every day, for over a year, but that's not the case anymore. Hell, he used to shoot more in a single day than he has in the past five combined, so really he hasn’t been doing that much at all.

Not at all.

Eight hours since his last dose. It’s started. He’s yawning, fidgeting, feels clammy and cold.

He decides to go to bed, hoping to fall asleep before it becomes impossible. He rolls himself tightly into the blankets like a corpse being wrapped up in a carpet, but merely ends up watching the glowing red numbers of his digital clock tick by until he sees the next hour, at which point he gives up on calling it an early night.

He eats a pear, flips back and forth between the dozen or so channels he has on his cable-less television, but he’s going to need a little bit more than the white noise of reality TV to distract himself at this point. His entire body is beginning to crawl with a dreadful anxiety that feels like swarms of burrowed insects wriggling around inside his skin and his every organ moans with a hunger for one thing and one thing only.

Despite being familiar with this routine by now, it still never fails to astonish him how both brain and body could become so utterly possessed by this… this thing. This thing that could weave itself so seamlessly into the very fabric of his being, like a parasite that grows to overtake its host, to the point where he cannot extract one without tearing apart the other. The concept of physical vs. psychological does not exist during these first few days, when simply every single component of himself is screaming for relief, from blood cells to brain receptors.

Half past midnight, Roy is still awake and feeling worse by the second. This morning’s deluded optimism is all but gone, run out of town by sweats and chills and the realisation that this is only the beginning.

He just doesn’t understand why or how it got this bad this quickly. In a mere week he seems to have already reached a point that had taken him months to get to the first time around.

This is all wrong, it shouldn’t be starting already, hell it shouldn’t be starting at all, because he was smart, he’d been careful – it was an accident i didn’t mean to i swear this was never supposed to happen – but the worst part of all right now is the dread of knowing what happens next… He’s no longer that haplessly clueless creature who thought a couple days of insomnia and cramps would be as bad as it’d get, no, now he knows better, he knows only too well, knows he should be fucking terrified.

Well, he is.

As luck would have it, Kaldur calls the following morning, and for the second time this week – the first time Roy had let it go to the machine and just never phoned him back, but he knows he probably can’t get away with that again. He’s already been pretty reclusive for the past couple of weeks and further avoidance would likely arouse more suspicion than anything he could actually say or do.

So he picks up.

When he says hello, it gets caught on a yawn and he sounds half-dead.

“Feeling unwell?” Kaldur notes observantly.

“Yeah, don’t know why,” Roy says, shocked by how easily the lie slips out, coming as naturally to him as nocking an arrow.

“Ah. I will make this a short call, then.”

Kaldur doesn’t even sound suspicious. Roy tries not to be too immensely relieved.

Then Kaldur says, “I have been talking with the Team as well as with our mentors.”

Relief immediately disappears.

Roy’s eyes widen and he’s glad that Kaldur can’t see the panic on his face. “W-what? Why?”

Oh God, he thinks. They know. But how the hell is that even possible? The only person he’s had any real contact with since he started using again has been Ollie, and he hadn’t even been high at the time. Maybe that’s the problem – he’s been MIA too long, and everyone knows that it’s never a good sign.

But Kaldur just says, “How would you like to start joining the Team in training? Perhaps we could try once a week for now, and see how it goes from there.”

Roy swallows convulsively. This wasn’t what he’d been expecting. It’s certainly better than what he’d thought was coming, but it still brings with it a whole new set of problems.

How does he turn down Kaldur’s invitation when just weeks ago he’d been begging to be allowed to come on a mission with them?

The worst part is that he doesn’t even want to decline. He would fucking love to be back in action, even if it’s not on the frontlines just yet. He had meant it when he’d told Kaldur it was the only thing he’s good at. And not only that, but it’s really truly the absolute only thing that makes him feel like himself, as fucking corny as that may sound.

Or at least, it was the only thing that made him feel like himself until that self became consumed by heroin.

And this is why he knows he cannot accept Kaldur’s offer.

“Maybe not just yet,” Roy finally says, trying to suppress another yawn.

“Oh…”

“I-I thought about it some more,” Roy stammers, lying through his teeth, “And, um, I thought maybe you’re right, maybe I’m not ready yet.”

“Of course,” Kaldur replies approvingly. “I understand. I am glad you were able to recognise this about yourself.”

There is genuine pride in his voice and it gives Roy the sickest feeling in the very pit of his stomach, like his guts are shifting and twisting and mutating, like his entire anatomy is fighting to rearrange itself into something better, something it could never be.

Or maybe it's nothing that deep, and it’s just nausea.

He forces down a gagging noise as he tells Kaldur there’s someone at the door, then he hangs up and dashes to the washroom, only making it as far as the sink. He’s had but a banana and apple juice for breakfast so it’s mostly just bile that sears his throat on its way up, followed by a good minute or two of dry heaves.

When he finally pulls his head out of the sink, he catches a glimpse of himself in the medicine cabinet mirror. He wishes he was one of those people who claim they can’t recognise themselves because of how much they have changed, whether for better or for worse. Because even if it’s for worse, that at least implies they were indeed well at some point in the past, and therefore have a reasonable chance of re-attaining that wellness.

Roy can remember no such past-self to hold on to.

He looks at his reflection, this snotty sweaty sallow-skinned creature with watery eyes sunken into dark sockets and several days worth of reddish stubble dotting a jaw that is clenched with pain, and he doesn’t have any life-changing epiphany, doesn’t say, My God, how did I let it get this far? Seeing himself looking so haggard produces absolutely no reaction in him that might kick-start him into wanting to change.

It’s not even a matter of him having looked like this for so long that it’s become normal, because that’s not the case. It’s more just like… he accepts it, just as one might come to accept being diagnosed with a terminal illness.

Because there’s simply nothing he can do about it.

That’s what they’ve been trying to tell him all this time, isn’t it? He is powerless over this; once an addict, always an addict; always recovering, never recovered, etc.

He has begun to come to terms with the possibility that this is simply what the rest of his life is going to look like. An endless cycle of relapse and recovery. It certainly looks like it if those old junkies in the adult support groups he’d tried are anything to go by.

So maybe he should stop trying to fight it so hard. Stop beating himself up so badly when he fucks up, because it’s the guilt and sense of utter failure that gets him worse than anything. Maybe lasting abstinence is an unreasonable goal, and he shouldn’t have to feel so terrible when he slips. He just needs to aim a little lower, that’s all. If it’s your first time pole-vaulting then you probably aren’t going to start with the bar on the highest rung.

One day at a time, they all say, but it’s bullshit because barring some freak disaster, this is likely not his last day on earth; he’s got weeks and months and years of one day at a time’s after this, and it will inevitably wear him out. It’s not like once he survives that one day, he returns to full health like a video game character who regains all its hearts when it moves on to the next level. No, he starts the next day exactly where he ended the last one, meaning he is always on a downward slope, with each passing hour sapping him of more and more strength until there is simply none left.

The following afternoon is when that reserve of resolve completely empties out. He decides fuck it, but tells himself it’s okay because he’s only buying enough to get him through today, then tomorrow he’ll really strap down and kick it.

He could even prepare for it this time. Load up on Nyquil, Imodium, ibuprofen. Drown himself in Gatorade and multivitamins and every flavour of soup possible. When he sees Dr. Foster, he could even ask her for benzos to take the edge off and help him sleep.

He doesn’t make it that far.

Monday morning he calls Dr. Foster to cancel his appointment, claiming a bad stomach flu, which he supposes isn’t that much of a lie since if he doesn’t get more soon that’s sure as hell how he is going to be feeling.

He manages to survive the rest of the week on as little dope as possible and avoids the suspicion of others by calling Ollie and Kaldur and Dinah for quick chats whenever he’s lucid enough to get away with it.

He’s actually pretty surprised at how easy it is. Seems like they’re all a lot more eager to forgive and forget than he’d thought, which is probably what’s best for everyone.

Nobody needs to know about this. He’ll taper off soon, he’ll kick it himself, this will be his little secret and he won’t have to let anyone down again.

That’s perhaps what he fears most of all – it’s not the shitting or the vomiting or the maddening spasms of hopelessly restless legs. It’s not even the perpetual dead weight of the depression. No, his greatest fear is that someone will find out. That he will fail the people who had always believed in him, disappoint those who had learned to, and prove right those who never did.

He falls into that third category himself.

Perhaps even from the get-go, he’d known on some level or another that this was an endeavour destined for failure. After all, everything else he’s ever done has met a similar fate, so why would this, a fight that could fell a man ten times stronger than him, be any different?

Suddenly it occurs to him that maybe he never even wanted to succeed. His recent decisions would certainly lend irrefutable support to this theory.

Roy knows he’s an idiot, but he’s not stupid. Despite his endless attempts at rationalising and justifying and making excuses for himself, he was fully aware of what he was getting himself into the moment he picked up the phone and dialed that lethal number. He knew exactly what he was doing when he bought the ten-pack of syringes, was totally conscious of the consequences when he slammed the first shot, and then the second, and then all the ones after that.

So why had he fucking done it?

In a way, the fact that he started using again is even more mortifying than having ever started using in the first place.

Dr. Foster had once asked him if he ever regrets the first line he ever snorted, if he ever wished he could take it all back. He didn’t even have to think about the answer.

Of course he didn’t.

What was that saying again… Better to have loved and lost, than never to have loved at all?

Granted, this probably isn’t the situation that Tennyson had in mind when he came up with that adage, but Roy doesn’t think it’s much different, really.

Just because it ended badly doesn’t mean the good days never happened.

But were the good days worth all the bad?

Definitely not, and yet Roy knows that if given a second chance, he’d do it all over again.

Which is the fucking stupidest part of all.

Even knowing what would happen, he would do it all over again. Hell, that’s what he’s doing right now, isn’t it?

He no longer has the excuse of ignorance. He’s no longer that brash, arrogant kid who’d lunged headfirst into these drugs under the typical teenage impression that he was untouchable, that he was blessed with some unknown ability that would allow him to escape the fate of every other addict who had also started off on the exact same road, led on by the exact same assumptions.

Those poor fools obviously just didn’t have the restraint and self-control that Roy had.

How jarring and humiliating it had been when Roy finally realised he possessed no such qualities after all.

It was a learning experience, that’s for sure, and a lesson that he swore he’d never forget.

And yet, here he is.

And this time, he can’t claim innocence – ‘oh dear, I didn’t know it could get this bad!’ – he knew exactly how bad it would get and he went ahead with it anyway.

God, how the fuck is he supposed to explain this to Kaldur? To Ollie, or Dinah?

Simple.

He won’t.

He can’t let them know. It’s just too pathetic. As shameful as it had been for them to learn about his problem the first time, at least he still had the chance to salvage himself. To pass it off as this one-time thing, this sort of ‘oops!’ moment of bad judgment that he would quickly put behind him.

It would be time for a pat on the back and a guest spot on Oprah to share his inspiring story of Overcoming Adversity, about how he so gallantly Conquered Addiction and Regained Control Of His Life.

Fool me once…

Everyone was so proud of him. He had finally proven he could do something right, even if it was only reversing something he never should have done in the first place. He was fixed, he was cured, he was going to have A Fresh Start and never let himself look back, because dear god what kind of a trainwreck of a human being would someone have to be to let themselves return to such a dark place?

Fool me twice…

A trainwreck like Roy.

It was one thing to be a complete fuck-up for the first time, before he’d had a shot at reformation, but it’s bringing failure to a whole new level when he works so hard to fix something just to smash it all to bits again. It shows that he just isn’t capable of keeping anything together, that he’s always doomed to backslide no matter how much progress he might have made.

Shame on me.

After several weeks of halfhearted attempts at quitting, Roy finally decides he’s had enough.

He’ll go to Dr. Foster and confess everything and get some real help.

…After this last binge, though.

He just needs this one last binge because he couldn’t end it on a bad note. Just as with any other relationship that you’re pulling the plug on, it’s best not to leave with the bitter taste of resentment clinging to the back of your throat. Let these last memories be fond ones.

A last hurrah. A bang, not a whimper. If this is going to be his last time ever, then he wants to make sure it’s better than the most mind-blowing break-up sex he’s ever had.

Roy spends the next few days in a blissful stupor, with the pinnacle being the Sunday before his therapy appointment. He rises with the sun, measures out the perfectly-sized dose for a first-thing-in-the-morning hit – enough to get him up and running and eager to start the day, but not so strong that he’ll be totally zonked and not be able to get anything done – and he eats two bowls of some chocolatey cereal that he doesn’t remember buying.

After sitting there for a long time just enjoying the cascading warmth, he hauls himself to his feet, opens a window, and turns on the radio before plopping back onto the couch. Drifting in and out of dreams, he barely registers the music, all his senses feeling slightly plugged, but it serves as ambient noise that keeps him buoyant, just as the summer breeze drafting through the window is like a hot air current ensuring that he stays afloat.

Everything is going so well, he marvels to himself. He’s pacing himself flawlessly, getting his dosage spot-on, and he’s able to enjoy himself guilt-free because he knows he’ll be getting his shit together after this.

It’s exactly what he wanted, and isn’t it always like that, that the time you swear will be your last is the time that’s so good it makes you never want to stop. It’s really a shame that it will have to end, but he tries not to think about that now. Can’t be wasting this precious last day freaking out about what’s to come.

He has lunch, then shoots up again, a big fat fix this time, one that’s all tingles and snakes the breath right out of his throat. For a crazy wild moment he feels completely absent, not even like he’s dead or dying, but that he simply is not there,and never has been, and he thinks this is it, it’s finally happened. The bullet he’d managed to dodge for years, the one whose heat he’s occasionally felt as it grazed the skin but never found its fatal mark, the one that had struck so many friends, it’s finally hit him point-blank, he’s done, he’s done for, no one is going to find his corpse until it starts to stink.

About five seconds later, however, everything starts to settle and the initial overwhelm has faded into a delicious heat, like a slap on the face that stings at first before melting into oddly pleasant pins and needles.

And now instead of being afraid he has taken too much, he becomes afraid that he hasn’t taken enough, because he feels absolutely incredible and never wants this sensation of total wellbeing to fade.

He soon nods the fuck off and consequently does not hear the phone when Dr. Foster calls him several times in a row because it's actually Monday, not Sunday, and he was supposed to have been in her office half an hour ago.

By around four o'clock, he’s ready to go again.

He inspects the remaining amount of dope, realising with a dull panic that he’s down to the last of it now. It’s a lot, but not quite enough to split into two shots without one of them being virtually useless.

The obvious solution is to do it all at once.

As he’s tying off, a song comes on the radio, which has been playing the entire time since Roy turned it on hours ago, but he’s only started to really pay attention to it now. It’s a song he’s never heard before, and for some reason it stops him dead in his tracks, makes him release the tourniquet and set the syringe down as he lets the mournful notes roll over him like a funeral march.

Sometimes I wish you would leave me
I'm not sick of you yet
Is that as good as it gets
I'll just hide it, or I could slip into you
It's so easy to come back into you

He stares at the radio with a slightly impatient, expectant expression, as if willing it to explain itself – what is the meaning of this, anyway? How dare it distract him from his precious ritual with some totally dysfunctional love song?

Shaking his head in slight disbelief at the obvious absurdity of the situation, he resumes his loving procedure.

I stared for awhile and waited for words
Seen but not heard and struggle to try
My tongue's turning black, but I'll take you back
You're still the best more or less, I guess, I guess

It’s not until he punctures the vein that he realises it might not be a love song at all.

At least, not the kind that’s about a girl or a boy, and certainly not the kind that’s good for you.

It’s about the kind of love he had been asked to write about.

Love that was meant for someone else but always seemed to get lost and end up somewhere between the barrel and the bevel, then into his blood, never reaching its intended recipient.

It’s the kind of love he never actually gave to the person in his life who deserved it most.

It hurts me to say that it hurts me to stay
And it might be all right if you go

He clenches his jaw to try and block off his hearing in the weird way that he’s noticed he can sometimes do if he’s high enough, and slowly starts to press the plunger down.

He hasn’t even injected the full shot when it hits him and he shudders suddenly, almost poking right through the vein.

The pins and needles start up again, this time strong enough to feel more like a sting or a burn, but it’s not entirely unpleasant, so he just waits there for a minute, holding the syringe in place until he decides it's safe to slam the rest of the shot.

Apparently he does not wait long enough.

The last thing he remembers is the song on the radio climaxing into an eruption of noise over a voice ripped raw by harrowing words wrenching themselves from the throat like blood being wrung out of a towel.

Sometimes I think that the bitter in you and the quitter in me
Is the bitter in you and the quitter in me
The bitter in you and the quitter in me
Is the better in you and the quitter in me

The bitter in you and the quitter in me is bigger than the both of us

Blurriness.

Blink.

Once, twice.

White light that must be heaven.

…Heaven?

No, he doesn’t deserve heaven.

“That’s it, that’s good, just keep breathing,”

comes Jason’s voice from somewhere above him, and he sounds like he’s freaking out. Roy tries to open his eyes, which proves to be too difficult, so he focuses more on breathing, which is also difficult, but still manageable. It requires a shitload of concentration, though. It’s decidedly odd when a function as natural and automatic as breathing suddenly becomes this chore that calls for constant diligence. In fact, even just thinking about all this is distracting enough that he forgets to breathe until Jason slaps him again and he takes a noisy, rattling inhalation, wondering when it will all go away.

someone’s saying gently.

They’re moving, it’s bumpy.

Roy tries to tell them to slow down because he’s feeling carsick but there’s a mask over his mouth and nose and he can’t keep his eyes open anyway.

The next time he comes to, he awakens in what he is pretty sure is the secret tenth circle of hell. His skin feels like it’s dripping right off, his veins are alight with napalm, bones being grinded to dust. Even his nails and hair and every other supposedly nerveless part of his body seem to be hurting, as though every cell, every atom, is turning itself inside out.

“What the fuck did you do to me?” he gasps, to no one in particular, except he’s still wearing some kind of oxygen mask and can’t catch enough breath to really speak.

A doctor who he had completely not noticed was there starts explaining things to him in a somewhat glacial voice that Roy can’t focus on because jesus fucking christ it hurts but the gist of it is

he overdosed (you don’t say), his father (…Ollie?) found him after his doctor had reported that he hadn’t shown up for his appointment (that was today?!), now he’s in the hospital (fuck) and they shot him with naloxone to counteract the heroin (double fuck) which basically kick-started advanced withdrawals (fuck fuck fuckity fuck fuck fuck).

Roy barely has time to think shoulda just let me die before a wave of nausea bowls him over and he’s frantically clawing at the ventilating mask because he doesn’t exactly fancy the idea of flooding it with puke. Someone’s hands are suddenly there helping him slide it off, and another pair of hands quickly appear with a basin which he leans over and promptly throws up in for several minutes straight.

When the vomiting finally stops, he sinks back into the bed, thoroughly spent, but his muscles refuse to settle, body twitching spasmodically. Through the pain roaring in his ears, he picks up some kind of kerfuffle taking place not too far away, perhaps out in the hall, though he can’t really tell because everything sounds far away right now.

“I’m sorry, sir,” someone’s saying, “But I’m afraid that you just can’t—”

“The hell I can’t!” roars another voice, and even in his pitiful state, Roy can tell that it’s Ollie. “And don’t you talk to me about being afraid. I’m the one who should be goddamn afraid, lady.”

There’s no answer from the orderly and when Ollie speaks again, his tone has lost all its anger and the words seem to be so brittle that they snap in half.

“Don’t you get it? That’s my son in there.”

Maybe forty-five minutes later, Roy finally feels the fire in his veins beginning to recede and he closes his eyes in pure relief as the heroin starts to take over in his body again. Unfortunately, the doctors notice this, too, and explain to him that because naloxone wears off long before heroin does, they’re going to have to give him another shot to keep the overdose from essentially coming back.

Roy tries to physically fight them off.

He thinks he might’ve even succeeded if Ollie hadn’t been there to help them hold him down, which was probably one of the most humiliating things that has ever happened to him, but he would have done literally anything to keep from having to feel that kind of pain again.

That’s the real basis behind everything he’s ever done, isn’t it? The fear of being in pain. It’s partly why he started using in the first place, it’s definitely why he kept using, and now it is why he is willing to take the chance that he will drop dead as long as it means not having to hurt like that anymore.

One would think that somebody in the superhero business wouldn’t be adverse to a bit of pain every now and then, but apparently not.

It’s also kind of funny because every time Roy believes he’s experienced the absolute worst possible suffering known to man, something else comes along and teaches him that there will always be something that can hurt more.

Acute withdrawal had once seemed like the most unbearable thing Roy had ever been through, but as it turns out, the precipitated version is even worse, despite only lasting hours compared to days. Sure, it's shorter-lived, but it's like compressing the entire length of normal withdrawals into two excruciating hours of compounded agony.

But even the fiery all-consuming pain of the naloxone-induced withdrawal can’t hold a candle to just how utterly destroyed he's feeling right now as he follows Ollie out of the hospital, a leaflet listing treatment options folded into his back pocket.

Ollie had barely spoken a word during the entire three and a half hours he spent sitting next to Roy. He raised his voice only once, when he demanded that the doctors give Roy something for the pain, which obviously wasn’t possible, so he just held Roy’s hand in silence as the boy’s body snapped and twisted on the bed.

It’s not until they’ve gotten into Ollie’s car that he finally lets loose. He yells at Roy all the way home and Roy sits there and takes it without saying a word because he knows it’s what he deserves.

The thing about Oliver Queen is that even though he never finishes a single thing, he’s pretty good at starting them.

He tells Roy he’s not going anywhere until they figure out what to do next, and takes him to his house on the other side of Star City, where, to Roy’s horror, Dinah is waiting for them and she looks like she’s been crying.

“Please don’t be mad,” is all Roy can say to her in a wobbly whisper, sounding about as young and childish as he feels.

Even though he deserves everything he’s gotten, he just doesn’t think he’ll be able to handle hearing it all again, least of all from Dinah.

Ollie had already ripped him apart during the drive home. He hadn’t been angry per se, but the only way he knows how to process any threatening emotion is by turning it into anger, which is a virtue that was clearly passed on to Roy, though he hadn’t argued with Ollie because every word was true. It was true that he was stupid and selfish and things were going so well so why let this happen and how could he have done this to Ollie, to Dinah, to everyone who loved him, doesn’t he have any idea just how much it would destroy them to lose him?

Roy has a pretty good fucking idea.

He has never belonged to the ‘everyone would be better off without me’ school of self-loathing. He knows people care about him. He may not be able to understand why, but he knows that they do. In a way, that makes him so much more despicable – he continues to do this to his family and friends despite being fully aware of how much it hurts them.

That’s why he had tried so fucking hard to hide it this time. During his initial problem, he had been much too wrapped up in himself to really notice how it was impacting those around him. The only reason he struggled to keep it all hidden was because he was afraid that if someone discovered his secret, they would make him stop.

This second time around was different. It was no longer a matter of covering it up so that he could continue doing it. Rather, he covered it up because he knew it would devastate everyone he loves if they found out and he didn't want to cause them any more grief than he already had.

Well, he did a great fucking job with that, didn’t he.

Still drowsy from the last of the heroin, he feels like he’s been dropped out of an airplane, then hit by a truck and then a bus, and even though he’s also agitated as hell, all he wants to do is sleep, sleep until this is all over, even if it takes a hundred years, even if it means never waking up.

It suddenly occurs to Roy that Dinah is hugging him.

“Of course I’m not mad,” she sighs once she draws away.

“See, Ollie?” Roy grumbles petulantly. “Dinah’s not mad at me.”

Ollie’s expression dissolves and he sits down on the sofa, motioning for Roy to take a seat next to him. He does, hesitantly, and Dinah sits on his other side, and normally Roy would find it uncomfortable being boxed in like this, right now all he can feel is safe.

“Damnit, kid,” Ollie says, forcing a rueful smile. “I’m not mad at you either. I just… You know how I get when I’m scared.”

“You turn into even more of an asshole than usual,” Dinah provides helpfully, and Roy agrees with a faint nod.

“You know it. And Roy… I’ve… I’ve never been that scared in my life.”

“I’m sorry,” Roy says almost inaudibly, unable to look up from the ground, where he vaguely notices that Ollie's carpets look a lot cleaner than he remembers. Probably Dinah's influence.

“Maybe this is karma kicking my ass, trying to teach me the lesson I was too thick to get the first time,” Ollie continues wearily. “I don’t know. I just know I can’t… I can’t lose you, Roy. Not again.”

Roy’s toes are literally curling, he feels so ashamed.

“Okay,” he says, then yawns.

“ ‘Okay?’ ” Ollie repeats furiously, and certainly the yawning didn’t help Roy's case.

Roy shrugs. “Not supposed to make promises I can’t keep, right?”

“Shit, Roy. Don’t say that.”

“Okay. Sorry. I take it back. I’m sorry.”

That night, Roy agrees to everything he’d been too stupidly proud to accept the first time. Supervised detox, residential treatment, then outpatient followup. The whole fucking shebang. He just wants it to be over, even if it never will be.

Ollie says he’s proud of him. Dinah says it, too, and adds that Kaldur and everyone else will be proud of him as well, but Roy just feels like an asshole.

He remembers how adamant he’d first been against taking these measures. He truly believed that he was stronger than those losers who couldn’t kick it without NA or inpatient or methadone.

So cocky, so assuming, so fucking delusional.

He had been trying so hard to prove something, even though he doesn’t know what or why or to whom.

The only thing he’s proven is that he is arrogant and weak and stupid, all of which were already rather widely-recognised attributes of his.

“All right,” Ollie says, phone in hand, glancing at the list of options they had spent the past forty-five minutes compiling. “I’m going to check if any of these places have a bed open, then after that we can drive by your house and get some overnight things, ‘kay, Roy?”

“Maybe Dinah can take me?” Roy asks.

They both look a little surprised. Ollie moreso than Dinah, and Roy can’t help but to spitefully hope that Ollie is at least a little offended that Roy is choosing Dinah over him.

Hopes that Ollie makes the connection between how he had treated Roy and why Roy is choosing Dinah.

This resentful ill-will only lasts a fraction of a second, though, before the guilt kicks back in. Guilt seems to be Roy’s default setting these days. He supposes this is a slight improvement than when Being A Total Asshole had been his default setting. An improvement for the people around him, at least, but it sure as fuck makes his own life a bit less pleasant.

“It’s just that I’m already starting to feel a bit, um, sick,” he explains awkwardly. “I just… want to get this over with.”

“I understand,” Dinah says. “For sure, I can take you. Keys, Ollie?”

“Wait,” Roy says suddenly, after Ollie’s tossed Dinah his car keys. “Can, um, can you call Kaldur, too, while you’re at it?”

“Kaldur?” Ollie repeats, looking uncertain.

“Yes,” Roy says firmly, because Kaldur has the right to know what’s going on now, but Roy sure as hell doesn’t want to be the one who has to explain it.

For a moment it looks like Ollie is going to disagree with him and Roy prepares himself for an argument, but finally Ollie just nods. Roy makes sure he and Dinah are out of there fast because he doesn’t want to have to hear any of it.

They drive in silence for a couple of minutes and Roy has a question stewing in his brain that he lets bubble until it spills over and he finally asks, “Why are you doing this?”

Dinah glances over at him, looking slightly befuddled. “Why wouldn’t I?”

“Because you have no obligation whatsoever to your boyfriend’s disgruntled ex-sidekick,” Roy says bluntly. “Least of all cleaning up after his messes in virtually every sense of the word.”

“God, Roy,” Dinah says, sounding stricken. “Is that really what you think? That no one’s going to care for you unless they’re obligated to?”

“Sometimes they still don’t even if they are obligated,” Roy mutters, but there’s no self-pity in his voice, just a certain resigned bitterness.

There’s not really much that Dinah can say to that, so she stays silent.

Roy is yawning non-stop like he’s in the most boring lecture ever, his nose is starting to run, he can’t stop jiggling his goddamn legs and he figures he has nothing to lose so he says, “I couldn’t’ve done it w-without you.”

“Any time, bud,” she tells him with a strange smile on her face that holds both gratitude and sorrow.

“I mean it, though,” Roy presses, needing her to understand that he understands just how much she’s done for him. “I was… I’m just Ollie’s baggage. You could’ve easily chosen to not have anything to do with me, and nobody would’ve faulted you for it, and, and yet—” Dinah looks stunned and like she wants to interrupt but Roy cuts ahead and finishes, “You’ve treated me more like a son than anyone ever has.”

He feels himself starting to flush with slight embarrassment at this sudden soul-baring and he sniffs and wipes his eyes, pretending it’s just the withdrawal that’s making them all watery.

“Roy,” Dinah says again, and she actually sounds like she might cry, and Roy wonders for a moment if he’s said the wrong thing. “You… I mean… …Really?”

“Yeah. Of course.”

“You know,” Dinah begins, “…Well, I’m not sure I should be the one telling you this, but… Ollie and I… We’d been talking about… having children.”

Roy’s not quite sure he likes where this is going but he replies with just a neutral, “Oh?”

“Maybe not children plural,” Dinah clarifies. “Probably just child. Not sure we’d be able to handle more than one.”

“You could, but Ollie sure wouldn’t. I mean, look how I turned out.”

Dinah chuckles, but then she’s quiet for a long time before she says softly, “My body apparently vetoes the idea.”

It takes Roy a dense moment to understand what she means, but when he finally does, he lets out a bit of a strangled gasp.

“Oh, shit, Dinah,” is his movingly eloquent reaction. “Shit, I’m so sorry.”

“It’s all right.”

“Betcha don’t want to have children anymore, though, huh,” Roy jokes weakly, gesturing at himself to imply that he’s enough of a fuck-up to deter anyone from wishing to procreate.

“You’re right, I don’t,” Dinah agrees.

“Hey, I resent tha—”

“I already have you.”

“Dinah…”

“Sorry. That was tacky and weird.”

“No, no. I’m… I’m glad I have you, too.”

“We won’t tell anybody about this conversation.”

“What conversation?”

“Well played, boyo. Well played.”

When they return to Ollie’s, Kaldur is there and oh fuck, it looks like he’s been crying, too. If Ollie ends up shedding any tears tonight, then Roy thinks he will have hit a new record of number of people he’s made cry in a single evening.

Roy has barely walked through the door when Kaldur is at his side in an instant, pulling him into his arms, those lithe protective arms whose muscles Roy can map like his favourite city, and Kaldur’s saying something, the breath of his voice a hot sweep against the sweat on Roy’s neck, but he can’t quite pick out the words because everything hurts a little too much.

Roy sits down on the couch and Kaldur squeezes his hand as Ollie gives them an overview of the options. The only places that can take Roy in immediately are the detox centres, since almost all of the longterm rehabilitation programs require some kind of referral or lengthy admissions process, but that’s all right with Roy because he can’t even think much further than that anyway. Ollie says he’s also called Dr. Foster, who will start working on any necessary paperwork so that by the time Roy gets out of detox, he’ll have somewhere to go for treatment.

“We can leave whenever you like, kid,” Ollie tells him.

Roy nods blankly, completely unable to take this all in, so he excuses himself to the washroom where his twitches of anxiety promptly become a full-bodied full-blown panic attack. He doesn’t hear the knock on the door or Kaldur’s soft voice asking if he’s okay, all that exists right now is the sound of his own terror, rabid and frothy-mouthed, its centrifugal force sending all rational thought clattering away like pennies being thrown at a whirring fan, and his breath bubbles out in spasming hiccups and he honestly feels like he’s going to die and this prospect scares the shit out of him, which makes no sense because he supposedly does not care much for being alive anyway, and it’s also funny because when he actually was dying, he’d felt absolutely nothing at all.

“Roy,” Kaldur’s repeating, sounding far away, his hands closing protectively around Roy’s heaving shoulders. “Roy. Just breathe. You are all right.”

Roy realises he’s on the ground and that the floor seems to be falling out from beneath him so he scrambles for purchase, clutching Kaldur’s wrists to keep himself from spinning away.

At this point he’s not even sure what he’s so afraid of, really. He certainly dreads the hell his body is going to put him through in these upcoming days, but knowing that he’ll have help this time makes it ever so slightly less daunting – not to say that Dinah hadn’t been helpful, but as supportive and patient as she had been, she was no doctor.

Maybe what he’s most scared of now is what comes after all that.

As agonising a process as it may be, he knows he can survive getting clean, because he’s done it before, and, more importantly, it’s a fight with an end in sight.

But staying clean… that was the part he couldn’t quite seem to get.

And of course that just has to be the part that lasts the longest.

As in, the rest of his life.

As in, forever.

‘Til death do us part.

He’d barely been clean for three months yet it had felt like a lifetime, so how the fuck is he supposed to keep it up for the next fifty, sixty years? Of course, he’ll probably die long, long before that, but the idea of even just another week spent like this feels absolutely impossible to endure.

‘One day at a time’ my ass, he thinks miserably to himself, tipping forward into Kaldur’s grip as he tries to calm down enough to breathe, or even see.

It could be two minutes or ten or twenty before finally the thrashing of his heart starts to slow and the room comes back into focus again.

“Y-you’re h-h-h-here,” he finally murmurs to Kaldur, voice breathless and faint.

“Of course I am here,” Kaldur whispers back, and this whole scene is achingly familiar, if not a total déjà vu; Roy just wonders if this time the ending will be different.

“Kaldur, I’m… ’m sorry.”

Kaldur nods. “I know, my friend.”

Roy curls up against Kaldur’s chest, words unfurling in a thick sob that he’s too tired to be embarrassed about when he says, “I don’t want to be like this anymore.”

“I know.”

The admissions room of the Star City Withdrawal Management Clinic is empty save for the woman behind the front desk, who is no doubt used to seeing people walk through the doors in much worse states, and she smiles warmly at him but Roy still feels incredibly, skin-crawlingly self-conscious. The leering red letter A that he’d felt was threaded onto his clothes that afternoon when he’d gone to the supermarket, revealing him as the filth that he was to all the upright and virtuous members of society, that badge of shame has now sprung to life, shrieking word of his failure out to the world.

Ollie’s hand comes down on his shoulder and he jumps.

“Sorry,” Ollie says quickly.

“’s o-k-k-kay,” Roy stammers out.

“Roy, I want you to know that no matter what happens, we’re proud of you, okay? …I’m proud of you.”

Roy’s lips tremble in a way that may or may not be an unhappy smile. “I fucked up, though.”

“Yeah, you did,” Ollie concedes. “But you haven’t given up. And… I know, now… I mean, I have a- a better understanding now, of how hard this is. You might do it this time, you might not. But Roy… I really, truly, do believe you can do it.”

“That makes one of us,” Roy mutters, but he’s more thankful for those words than Ollie will probably ever know.

“Go get ‘em, boyo,” Dinah says, also laying a reassuring hand on Roy’s upper arm, and he feels like a kid being dropped off on his first day of school but he’s not entirely ungrateful for it.

His attention then turns to Kaldur, who has been lingering awkwardly a few steps away. Roy glances at Ollie and Dinah, who both give him a slight nod which he returns with a smile before he walks over to Kaldur.

“So,” he says, breath fluttering, hands shaking, sweat running down the back of his neck. “Guess this is it, huh.”

“It is time,” Kaldur agrees quietly.

It’s time.

Time to rip this fucking A from his chest, and use it in a love letter that actually matters. 

“Kaldur?” he says.

“Yes, friend?”

“Keep an eye on your mailbox this coming week.”

And with that, Roy kisses him, long, deep and desperate, like he’s being sent off to the war, and Roy isn’t sure which one of them is doing the leaving but he does know he will be back, he has to, and when Kaldur nudges Roy’s mouth open and gently tugs at Roy’s lower lip in exactly the way he knows Roy likes – with just the slightest hint of teeth – Roy knows right then that Kaldur will be back, too, not that he’s ever left.

Roy breaks the kiss first, takes a moment to memorise the exact shade of silver of Kaldur’s eyes, then he walks over to the front desk and checks himself in.