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Roy knows he’s in trouble the second he smells the place.
The intel had said narcotics house—Black Mask money moving through Bowery runners—but intel never bothers to mention the things that matter. Not the humidity trapped in rotting drywall. Not the layer of old grime that turns every surface tacky. Not the chemical sting beneath mildew and body odor and industrial cleaner.
Bleach.
Ammonia.
Burnt metal.
Something sweet and sour underneath it all that hits the back of Roy’s throat like a fist.
His boots thud over warped floorboards as he follows Jason through the splintered front entry, Red Hood peeling off toward the kitchen while Roy sweeps the hallway on the left.
The house is eerily silent.
But not empty silent—more like a you-know-there’s-something-inside kinda quiet where it feels like everyone stopped breathing the second the front door came off its hinges.
Roy pushes past an overturned lamp and a nest of extension cords, stepping over crushed soda cans and dirty clothes. The scanner on his wrist pings movement from the back room at the end of the hallway.
He shoulders through the half-open door and nearly slips on something right in the entry way.
Roy glances down—there’s a needle under his boot.
Uncapped. Fresh enough to glint in the low lights.
His stomach turns hard.
For a split second he sees a different floor—different year—cheap motel, tile stained yellow at the grout while his own shaking hands fumble with a needle cap.
Roy swallows the lump in his throat and keeps moving through the door. His eyes land first on a lump, which he half hopes is a pile of blankets.
Then his gaze catches on a hand attached to the sprawled body beside a heavily stained mattress—Roy’s stomach drops fully through the floor.
It’s a boy no older than sixteen—maybe younger. From what he can see of his skin it’s gone that terrifying grayish-white that makes every medic in the world move faster.
“Shit—”
Roy is on his knees before the word fully comes out, fingers at the kid’s throat searching for a pulse.
It’s thread-thin, but there—barely.
He slaps his free hand against the comm at his ear, “Hood, OD—back left bedroom.”
Jason’s response crackles immediately, “One sec—clearing the rest of the house.”
Roy is already digging into the side pouch of his belt—searching for the flimsy packaging of his narcan.
He always carries two doses. Even when his primary residence was Star City he carried it.
Jason made sure to emphasize the rates of OD’s were much higher in Gotham. How everyone here carries it if they have half a brain and spend enough nights around the underbelly of the city.
Roy’s used it on strangers before. Dealers. Civilians. Once a fourteen year old behind a bus stop while the kid sobbed and vomited all over him.
Without wasting another second he jams the first spray into the boy’s nostril and depresses the plunger.
“Come on, kid,” he mutters, shifting to open the airway. “Come on.”
Roy twists when he hears a rustle behind him.
At first he thinks it’s just an animal under the mattress because all he catches is movement in the dark corner, but then the shadow unfolds itself from the wall and a girl appears.
She’s tiny.
Too tiny.
Fourteen—fifteen maybe? Greasy ponytail, makeup smudged over her face, hoodie hanging off one shoulder to reveal a ladder of fading puncture marks.
Even in the low light Roy can see her pupils are blown so wide her irises have nearly disappeared.
She squints at him like he’s hard to focus on.
“Hey,” Roy says carefully, one hand still braced under the boy’s neck, “Are you hurt?”
She stares at him, the red armor, the bow, the mask, the narcan, then to his belt—and with startling seriousness asks, “You got something else there?”
Roy blinks.
The girl points, her hands shaking from need over fear, “Anything? Please dude, I just need something—a little extra.”
The room seems to tilt.
Where is Jason?
He hears her words, understands them, but what lands in his chest is not sympathy at first—it’s recognition.
That awful bright edge of desperation.
The bargaining.
It’s not ‘help me’ or ‘save him’ or ‘call an ambulance’ it’s the constant need of more.
Just enough. Enough to make the inside stop clawing for a little while.
Roy’s fingers tighten involuntarily around the empty spray.
The girl seems determined as she pushes to her knees and crawls closer.
“C’mon,” she pleads, voice going whiny and impatient. “Don’t be a dick. You people always got confiscated shit. Just one—anything you got—please—”
Roy hadn’t registered how close she had gotten until her small hand wraps around his wrist in a feather light grasp.
The contact burns like a brand against his armored wrist. Something ugly and long bruised wakes up in perfect, nauseating detail.
He remembers every version of that sentence coming out of his own mouth.
Just one more.
Just enough to level out.
Just enough to think tomorrow. To get out of bed tomorrow. To go to sleep tomorrow.
Just enough to stop feeling every nerve ending on fire.
Roy’s heartbeat trips so hard it hurts in his chest.
“Arsenal. Status?” Jason says as he appears in the doorway, broad and immediate and solid in that way Jason always is when things are going bad.
His helmet sweeps the room once, clocking everything Roy had in under a second—the semiconscious girl, the spoon on the carpet, the needle under Roy’s knee, and the boy stretched boneless across the floor.
The kid's chest is barely moving now. Even with the narcan. There’s only a shallow little hitch every several seconds like his body keeps forgetting breathing is mandatory. His lips have shifted from faintly blue to a dusky, frightening purple.
“Respirations maybe four a minute,” Roy says tightly, hooking two fingers beneath the boy’s jaw and tilting his head back further to open the airway.
Jason swears under his breath and drops beside him.
His boyfriend reaches over the boy, pressing knuckles hard against his sternum, grinding for a pain response.
Nothing.
“Come on kid,” Roy mutters.
Jason strips one glove off long enough to feel for the same thready carotid pulse Roy had been feeling.
The first narcan should’ve done something by now.
Roy administers the second dose, then pinches the boy’s nose and seals a gloved hand over his mouth, forcing a rescue breath.
His thin chest rises—falls—then doesn’t rise again fast enough.
Roy does another.
Then another.
He counts in his head because if he doesn’t count he’s going to start hearing the girl behind him.
One—two—three.
Come on… breathe.
The boy gurgles wetly.
Jason shifts him instantly, rolling the kid partially onto his side while Roy clears his mouth with two fingers.
Vomiting is already bad, but vomiting unconscious is worse so when more saliva than puke comes up Roy lets out a breath of relief.
“Again,” Jason orders.
Roy rolls him back this time and forces another breath.
Behind them the girl starts talking—slurry and desperate and too familiar, but he can’t listen to her. Not right now, not when he’s still trying to make sure the kid sprawling on the ground gets to live another day.
After a few more forced breaths there’s a sharp, ragged sucking—then another.
It’s not good, not even close, but it’s breathing.
Roy sags for half a second in relief that never fully lands because the girl keeps rambling with barely there words and pleas for something—anything.
Gotham EMS pounds up the stairs less than a minute later, stretcher in tow.
Roy barely registers them taking over.
Barely hears Jason giving them a run down of what they administered.
All he can smell is bleach and burnt chemicals.
All he can hear is that girl asking for one more hit like it’s the most reasonable request in the world.
By the time they step back out into the cold Gotham night to get away from PD, Roy’s jaw hurts from clenching and his hands won’t stop shaking.
Jason notices immediately—Roy can see his helmet turn next to him.
“You alright?”
Roy laughs—it’s too quick and far too bright after something like that to be real.
“Peachy.”
Jason doesn’t answer, but Roy can feel the scrutiny even without seeing his boyfriend's eyes.
Roy tells himself it’s fine. Tells himself it was just a bad bust, just a rough scene, just old memories getting stirred up.
He tells himself a lot of things on the ride home after Jason calls it a night.
None of them do a damn thing to quiet the terrible, creeping realization taking shape at the center of his chest.
Because beneath the nausea, beneath the sweat, beneath the self-disgust, something inside him is awake now.
***
Roy has been sober long enough to know the first rule of not doing something catastrophically stupid is not giving the thought enough room to breathe.
You keep moving.
You keep talking.
You keep your hands occupied.
You keep your brain busy enough that it doesn’t start offering solutions.
Unfortunately, Gotham seems personally committed to making that impossible, and it makes Roy wonder why he didn’t force Jason to move into his old place in Star City.
By the time the two get home for the night it’s after two in the morning and Roy is vibrating hard enough under his skin that even peeling the armor off feels like too much sensation. His gloves hit the kitchen island. Then the bow. Then the chest plating. Each piece lands with a clatter that sounds three times louder than normal in their dark apartment.
Jason eyes him from across the room while pulling off his own helmet.
Roy offers his easiest grin.
“Well,” he says with a faux chipper, “that was profoundly traumatizing. Hungry?”
Jason doesn’t answer, not as he peels off his domino, or shucks off his gloves.
That should have been Roy’s first sign his boyfriend was on to him. Jason always answers, usually with sarcasm or a smirk.
Instead he just keeps looking at Roy like he’s sorting through puzzle pieces.
“Roy,” he deadpans.
“Jay!” Roy whisper-yells, with the biggest tease of a smile he can physically manage.
“Love—” Jason says, moving toward him with his hands outstretched. “You’re shaking.”
Roy glances down just as his boyfriend's large hands wrap around the exposed skin of his biceps.
Huh…
Guess I am.
Not dramatically. Just enough that when he flexes his fingers there’s a faint tremor running up them and into his shoulders.
Adrenaline.
That’s what he tells himself.
Bad scene. OD-dead-kid-adjacent… just adrenaline.
Totally normal.
Roy shoves himself out of Jason's grip and runs both hands through his cropped hair with a huffed laugh.
“Yeah, babe I mean—we just played bedside ICU in Gotham’s least charming crack house—I’m fine.”
The lie lands between them with all the grace of a dropped brick.
Mercifully, Jason doesn’t call him on it.
He just grunts and turns toward the stove top, “I’m making grilled cheese.”
The last thing Roy was expecting out of his boyfriend's mouth was that, and under any other circumstances the redhead would laugh and mean it.
Instead, he forces another smile, grabs a soda from the fridge, and hops up on to the counter to watch Jason cook.
The domesticity of it is good.
It should be grounding.
This is his boyfriend in just his tight leave-nothing-to-the-imagination underlayers making aggressively buttered sandwiches at two-thirty in the morning.
This should be enough to drag Roy’s nervous system back into something resembling alignment.
Instead all he can smell is bleach every time the silence stretches too long.
He cracks the can—flinching when the hiss sounds too much like aerosol Narcan.
Roy used it on plenty of people—but he also remembers having it used on him. The hiss sounds a hell of a lot louder when it’s in your own head.
Jason glances over his shoulder from the stove, narrowing his eyes, “You gonna stare or you gonna help?”
“I’m morally opposed to labor,” Roy teases with a smirk.
“You live here.”
Roy points a finger at him, “yeah but you cook. I clean—that’s the deal.”
Jason snorts softly, usually that tiny sound is enough to unknot everything wrong within Roy’s body and mind.
Tonight it barely dents the static.
He makes himself keep talking anyway.
He talks while they eat.
Talks while he cleans the pans and loads the dishwasher.
Talks while brushing teeth side by side—careful not to be too loud since Lian is asleep.
Talks himself in circles about patrol routes, Donna’s latest gossip, whether or not Lian’s dinosaur obsession should count as educational.
He talks because silence feels like a hallway with something waiting at the end of it.
Jason lets him.
Whether that’s because he is in no mood to converse, or because he knows Roy is spiraling—the jury's still out.
But Roy does see the little looks.
Narrowed eyes in the bathroom mirror, or the way Jason’s hand lingers at the small of his back while they lock up for the night.
Concern sits on Jason strangely. Quietly. He never pokes at a wound before he knows exactly where it is.
Roy should probably be grateful for that.
Instead it makes him feel itchy.
By the time they crawl into bed Roy is wound so tight he can hear his own pulse in his ears. Jason kills the lamp, the room dropping into familiar darkness, and for half a second Roy thinks maybe if he just closes his eyes hard enough he can force himself unconscious.
No such luck.
The static keeps humming.
He lasts all of the thirty seconds before rolling over.
Jason makes a sleepy questioning noise when Roy presses in close, planting a kiss along the raised scars across his jaw, sliding one hand under the hem of Jason’s shirt.
Normally this works.
Normally Jason, warm and solid and always just a little greedy when Roy starts something, would tug him in and let Roy loose himself in his skin and breath and movement until his head shuts the hell up.
So he kisses him deeper, trying to chase that same oblivion.
Except, Jason kisses him back only once—soft, automatic—but then his hand catches Roy’s wrist where it’s skated up his torso. Just enough to stop him.
Roy blinks in the dark, “Jay?”
Jason exhales, there’s a breath where the redhead can feel him choosing his words.
“Not tonight.”
Roy goes still, as Jason shifts onto his back. He keeps a hold of his wrist like he doesn’t want the rejection to feel like a shove.
“I love you,” his boyfriend murmurs quietly, thumb brushing over Roy’s pulse point. “But I’m not even remotely in the mood to be sexually useful—not after… all that.”
The words are blunt enough that under any other circumstances Roy might have laughed.
Instead something sour drops straight through his stomach.
Because of course. Of course Jason isn’t in the mood. They spent the last hour of patrol forcing oxygen into a dying teenager in a room that smelled and looked like every bad decision Roy ever made.
He should have thought of that before. Should have remembered how Jason deals with stress like that.
Where Roy is content to distract himself, Jason feels and he feels deeply.
Heat crawls up the back of his neck, shame curling in his gut.
Jeez—you’re an asshole.
He’s been so desperate to stop feeling like this that he hadn’t even stopped to consider that Jason had been sitting in that room too—and after everything he went through as a child.
Roy pulls his hand back immediately.
“Right,” he says, and even to his own ears he sounds too fast. “Yeah. Obviously. Sorry.”
Jason turns his head on the pillow, “Roy—”
“No, no, that was—” Roy cuts himself off with a brittle laugh, “that was incredibly tone deaf of me, actually.”
Jason pushes himself up on one elbow, “It’s not—”
“It’s fine babe,” Roy says quickly.
Which would maybe be more convincing if he didn’t sound like he was chewing through glass, because layered beneath the embarrassment is a nastier truth that Roy doesn’t want to inspect too closely: usually he can sleep his way through this.
Usually enough touch, enough endorphins, enough sweat and exhaustion buys him a few hours where his head shuts off.
Now even that option is gone.
Fantastic.
Roy rolls onto his back and stares at the ceiling, Jason stays propped up for another second just watching. He can feel his boyfriend's concern—feel the questions politely not being asked.
It makes Roy want to crawl out of his own skin.
After a moment Jason settles back down, but his hand slides over the sheets in the dark, pulling Roy’s till he’s on his side, back against his boyfriends solid chest.
It’s warm and at any other moment in time Roy would fall asleep peacefully with Jason’s steady heartbeat and breath. But this time—he lies there, rigid, eyes wide open, heart beat never steadying.
Sleep never comes.
Neither does it come Thursday.
Or Friday.
Time is measured less by clocks and more by caffeine intake, by how many times Jason asks if he’s okay in increasingly suspicious tones, by how many times Roy lies through his teeth and says yes.
By Friday afternoon he has consumed; three energy drinks, most of a twelve-cup pot of coffee, two sodas, a gas station espresso shot that tasted vaguely like battery acid, and exactly nothing that resembles rest.
By Saturday morning Roy has reached the deeply enviable state of being both exhausted enough to hallucinate shadows and wired enough that sitting still feels physically impossible.
He is pouring Lian cereal when she looks up at him from the kitchen table, pink spoon halfway to her mouth.
“Daddy?”
“Yeah?”
She squints in that alarmingly perceptive little-kid way that always makes Roy feel like she can see directly through his skull.
“Why are your eyes yucky?”
Roy laughs, but it’s pitched wrong.
“Strong start to the morning, bug.”
Lian lowers the spoon, “Are you sick?”
“Nope.”
“Well—you look sick,” Lian states, her legs kicking against the counter wall.
Great…
Roy turns back to the counter under the pretense of reaching for milk because he suddenly cannot handle the full force of his five-year-old’s concerned scrutiny before nine a.m.
He catches his own reflection in the microwave door—washed out skin, bloodshot eyes, mouth too tight. He looks exactly like somebody who should not be solely responsible for a child today.
“I think you need a nap,” Lian exclaims excitedly as Roy turns back to her, milk carton in hand. He glances toward the kitchen archway where Jason is visible in the living room pretending very hard not to eavesdrop while folding laundry.
Roy catches the brief flick of teal eyes before they busy themselves back with the clothes.
“You know what sounds way more fun than hanging out with your sleep-deprived Dad today?” The redhead asks after a second of staring at his daughter while she eats.
Lian’s head tilts to the side in a silent question.
“I think… Aunt Donna is missing her favorite niece.”
This is not technically true until Roy sends a text seconds later, but Lian’s face lights up immediately regardless of what she does or does not know.
“Can I go?” she exclaims, jumping down from the barstool.
Roy ruffles her hair as she barrels into his knees, forcing the grin to stay on his lips.
“I think Auntie D would behead me if you didn’t.”
Donna answers the text almost immediately after Roy sends it—mostly because Donna is many things, but unavailable in a childcare emergency has never been one of them.
By noon, Roy has packed a weekend bag and kissed the top of her head three separate times before buckling her into Donna’s car.
His friend leans over the center console once Lian is occupied with a book.
“You okay?” She asks with a pitched brow and pursed lips.
Roy gives her the same bright smile he has been feeding everyone for two days and nods once.
Donna raises one perfectly manicured dark brow.
“Just tired,” he supplies, praying it’s enough.
His friend studies him for one second longer than is comfortable, before nodding slowly.
“Call if you need anything.”
Roy shuts the door before she can ask the dangerous follow-up questions, and only when they’re gone does he let out the breath he’d been holding.
By Sunday afternoon Roy hadn't slept more than an hour at a time in three days.
His skin feels too tight.
His thoughts feel too loud.
And when Jason says he’s running downstairs to grab the takeout delivery, Roy smiles and tells him to get extra soy sauce.
Then he stands alone in the apartment listening to the front door click shut.
Silence rushes in.
Not the slow and steady Sunday-afternoon-soft quiet—no.
Vacuum sealed quiet, like all the air got sucked out with Jason when the front door shut.
For a few seconds Roy just stands there in the middle of the kitchen, fingers curled around the edge of the island, staring at absolutely nothing.
His brain helpfully supplies every sound missing from the room.
Jason’s music, Lian’s cartoons, the dryer thumping down the hall, a pan sizzling, the low murmur of Gotham traffic bleeding through the cracked windows.
None of it is there.
Just the ragged hitches of Roy’s own breathing.
He pushes away from the counter—movement has been the only thing keeping him stitched together for three days, but now that he’s stopped, getting started again feels wrong. Forced.
His limbs are heavy in that floaty disconnected way that comes right before panic decides to put its boot on your throat.
Roy paces once to the sink.
Turns.
Paces back.
He rubs his fists over his eyes hard enough to see stars.
“Fuck,” he mutters.
The word sounds thin in the empty apartment.
“Fuck! Fuckfuckfuckfuck—”
His fingers are shaking as he curses. Deeper than the tremor that started this whole mess. It’s a bone-level rattle that crawls all the way up his forearms and settles in his chest.
He braces both palms against the cool quartz counter and bows his head between his shoulders.
Breathe in.
Out.
In—
The smell hits him so fast he chokes.
Bleach.
Chemical burn.
The ghost of aerosol Narcan hissing.
Roy jerks upright with a strangled gasp.
No no no no nononono—
It’s not actually there. He knows it’s not there. Jason’s apartment smells like lemon dish soap and whatever overpriced detergent Alfred forces Jason to buy because it gets blood out of tactical gear better than anything.
But Roy can taste it.
Can feel the old motel air coating the back of his throat like tar.
His skin starts crawling in earnest.
Every seam of his t-shirt scratches.
Every pulse point pounds.
His teeth ache from clenching.
He needs—
Sleep.
Roy tells himself violently.
You need sleep. Nothing else.
That’s all this is. Three days of no sleep, too much caffeine, and one nasty trigger.
You’re not dying.
You are not relapsing.
You are just… tired.
Roy pushes off the counter and heads for the bedroom with all the determination of a man trying very hard to pretend he is making sane choices.
Melatonin.
There are melatonin gummies in the medicine cabinet because Lian thinks they taste like berries and Jason keeps forgetting they exist.
He can take three. Four. Ten?
Knock himself out.
Easy as that.
Perfectly normal.
The bathroom cabinet opens with a sharp crack against the wall—bandages, tylenol, hydrogen peroxide, half a tube of toothpaste, and the stupid purple melatonin bottle.
Roy snatches it, twists the cap, shakes two gummies into his palm.
Then four.
Then six.
He stares at them, bright purple, sugary, pathetic.
His whole body hums with the kind of frantic static that makes the thought of a children’s sleep aid almost laughable.
Roy swears under his breath and throws them straight into the sink hard enough that one bounces onto the tile.
“Fuck!” He shouts into the empty room, gripping the edge of the vanity until his knuckles whiten.
His eyes flick upward—the second shelf—empty except for gauze.
Then lower—under the sink cabinet—nothing, and yet—
A memory surfaces.
That tiny poisonous little spark.
A hospital bag in Jason’s dresser drawer from his fracture realignment the other week—an orange bottle.
Roy goes rigid.
No.
Absolutely not.
Jason keeps the apartment clean for a reason. Roy had asked him to.
No alcohol. No loose meds. Nothing stronger than ibuprofen and Lian’s vitamins.
Because Roy knows himself.
Because Roy has spent six years carefully, painstakingly building a life where temptation doesn’t get to sit casually in his apartment cabinet.
Jason forgot this once—one stupid forgotten bottle tucked in the back of his drawer.
Roy leaves the bathroom fast—too fast to be even remotely considered normal. Like if he moves quick enough maybe he can outrun the fact that he is now heading straight for his boyfriend's side of the dresser.
He yanks open the top drawer—socks.
Second drawer—gym shorts.
Third—paperwork and old mail.
No bottle.
Roy’s breathing picks up.
He drops to his knees and starts yanking things out.
Everything—anything he can get his hands on.
Drawer after drawer.
Insurance forms spill onto the floor—receipts—an old phone charger—Jason’s many passports—a rolled ace bandage.
No orange plastic.
“No, no, no, no—”
He is dimly aware that he sounds insane.
Dimly aware that Jason is going to come back to find the bedroom looking like it was hit by a tornado.
Dimly aware that none of that matters more than the screaming pressure building behind his eyes.
He lurches into the closet next.
High shelf first—he pulls down suitcases, duffle bags, and turns pants pockets inside out.
Nightstands are next—books get thrown onto the floor—pens and papers clatter against the hardwood.
Bathroom again.
Laundry room cabinet.
Kitchen junk drawer.
The apartment turns inside out around him.
Cabinet doors slam. Drawers rattle off their tracks.
His breaths come short and ugly and wet.
By the time he makes it back to the bedroom he is fully shaking, sweat cooling under the collar of his shirt despite the chill crawling over his skin. And somewhere in the middle of tearing through Jason’s meticulously organized apartment like a starving animal, Roy has to acknowledge the truth.
He is hunting.
And yet the thought does not stop him.
Instead he drops in front of Jason’s dresser side one more time and yanks the bottom drawer completely free of its tracks.
Something skids loose behind it.
A flash of orange is all Roy needs to see before his hands snatch it up.
Hydrocodone.
It’s not even been opened—eight pills are still rattling inside.
Roy sits back hard on his heels, bottle clenching in his fist so tightly the plastic creaks.
His thumb finds the cap—twists—stops—twists again.
His vision blurs, with tears or exhaustion, Roy isn’t sure.
One pill would pull him out of his misery—one pill would take the edge off enough to breath—one pill would turn the screaming in his head into cotton.
Roy knows exactly what one pill turns into.
He knows.
He knows.
Roy folds over himself on the bedroom floor with the bottle trapped between both palms, breathing hitching so violently it hurts.
He has never hated himself more than he does right now.
He also doesn’t hear the front door open, but he does hear the takeout bag hit the floor in a startled surprise.
The sound snaps through the roaring in his ears just enough that Roy jerks upright, clutching the orange bottle so hard that the plastic actually cracks.
Jason is standing in the bedroom doorway.
For one suspended second neither of them moves.
Roy has enough time to register three things in rapid, nauseating succession:
Jason’s eyes sweeping over the overturned drawers and scattered paperwork.
Jason’s gaze landing on the bottle in Roy’s hand.
Jason going completely, terrifyingly still.
Oh God.
Humiliation hits first—hot and violent.
Not because Jason caught him doing something he shouldn’t—though that’s certainly part of the nightmare—but because the entire scene must look exactly as ugly as it feels.
Three days of smiling and lying reduced to this.
“Jason, I—” His voice breaks before he gets farther than the name.
Jason crosses the room in three long strides and drops into a crouch in front of him, face unreadable. Which somehow feels infinitely worse than if his boyfriend has just started screaming. Like how Ollie had screamed.
That's the problem with Jason when he gets too calm—everything shutters down behind his eyes until Roy feels like he’s talking to a locked door.
His boyfriend holds out a single hand.
“Give me the bottle.”
Roy stares, casting glances down at the cracked plastic in his grasp—there’s already an opening—he could take one right now.
“Roy. C’mon, baby. Please.”
There’s not a hint of anger. Nor panic. Nor accusation.
It should help, but it doesn’t.
Roy’s fingers refuse to uncurl, he can hear his own breathing hitching wetly through his nose, can feel tears cooling on his cheeks that he hadn’t realized were there.
Jason’s hand doesn’t move. He just waits, until Roy finally drops the bottle into his palm.
His boyfriend reaches back without looking and sets it somewhere behind him out of reach.
Then he looks at Roy—eyes narrowing.
The redhead wants the floor to open up and swallow him whole.
There’s sweat sticking his shirt to his spine. Hands shaking uncontrollably in his lap. Chest pulling for air that never seems to go deep enough.
He knows what he must look like.
He has seen this look in mirrors before.
Seen versions of it in alleyways and rehab waiting rooms and twenty-four-hour gas station bathrooms.
Desperate, like a cornered rat.
One bad decision away from detonating six years of hard fucking work.
Jason lowers himself from a crouch to sit cross-legged on the carpet.
For half a second Roy thinks he’s going to stay there—at arm’s length, calm and unreadable and impossibly rational while Roy slowly dies of shame.
Instead, Jason shifts forward until their knees knock. One hand raises to settle against the back of Roy’s neck.
The grip is firm enough that Roy feels the pressure all the way down his spine.
Jason’s thumb drags once, slowly, through the damp hair at his nape.
“Hey,” Jason murmurs, and the word is rougher now, less command, more boyfriend.
It takes only a second where he’s folded in on himself before Jason is pulling Roy forward into his lap, toppling into his chest.
Jason wraps one arm around his shoulders. The other staying braced at the back of his neck.
Roy makes a broken sound against his shirt—half sob, half gasp. He hadn’t realized how badly he needed contact until that moment. Needed something stronger than his own shaking hands.
Jason shifts them both awkwardly on the carpet, settling back against the side of the bed enough to haul Roy with him. He ends up half sprawled against his boyfriend, cheek pressed to Jason’s sternum, fists twisting uselessly in the soft cotton of his t-shirt.
Jason holds him there, one broad palm moving slowly up and down between Roy’s shoulder blades.
His breathing is still coming in too fast—he knows it distantly, but can’t seem to care.
Jason waits through two ugly gasps before speaking.
“Love, you’re hyperventilating—you need to breathe.”
Roy chokes wetly in Jason’s chest, “Little late—for—yoga—techniques, Jay.”
Jason’s hand squeezes once at the back of his neck. “Roy,” his boyfriend insists.
Roy lets out a barely there breath, then tries.
Jason breathes in slow and deep under him—he can feel the expansion of his boyfriend's chest against his cheek—and then out.
Again.
And again.
Roy’s lungs hitch trying to match it, and after the fourth attempt he manages something closer to air than panic.
Jason keeps his hand moving on his back.
“Are you with me?”
Roy nods against him, because words seem aggressively out of budget. Opting instead to listen to the steady—maddeningly consistent—thud of Jason’s heartbeat under his ear.
“Talk to me,” Jason says, pressing his mouth briefly to the top of Roy’s head.
Roy stares at the rumpled cotton of his shirt twisted in his fists.
For a second he honestly isn’t sure where to start. There are too many ugly pieces, too many thoughts clawing over each other trying to get out first, and none of them sound any less pathetic once they make it to his tongue.
“I knew this was bad,” he says finally, voice scraped raw. “The second I thought about your surgery meds.”
Roy huffs a humorless breath, scrubbing the heel of his palm under one eye. “Like capital B bad. “Like ground zero, sound the fucking relapse alarms, this is not a drill bad.”
A tiny twitch ghosts at the corner of Jason’s mouth, but he stays quiet.
“But I still couldn’t stop myself from looking.”
Saying it out loud makes his stomach twist in knots, because there’s no hiding from it, no euphemisms, no softening language, no pretending this was anything less than what it was.
He hunted and knew exactly what he was hunting for.
Roy drags in another breath that shakes all the way through him.
“That girl… from the bust,” he says, Jason’s finger stilling for a beat before resuming. “She was so desperate, Jay,” his throat tightens at the memory of her blown eyes.
“Her friend was half dead on the floor, cops and EMS coming, knowing she was going to get arrested, and none of it—none of it—could compete with wanting another hit.”
Roy presses the heel of both hands briefly into his eyes like he can push the thoughts physically out of his head.
“She kept asking for more like it was the only thing in the universe that mattered.”
Jason exhales quietly beneath him.
“And I…understood her,” Roy adds, voice dropping. “I knew exactly what she meant. I knew what that felt like—all of it. The skin crawling, the panic, the bargaining, the way your whole body starts screaming that literally nothing else matters except making it stop.”
His laugh comes out broken.
“Fuck, Jason—I haven’t wanted that shit in years.”
Jason’s hand shifts higher, fingers threading into the hair at Roy’s nape.
He squeezes his eyes shut, wishing to lose himself in the feeling of his boyfriend's steady hand in his hair.
“Not like this—I’ve had bad cravings, shitty fucking anniversaries, passing thoughts, sure, and I’m sure as hell not gonna pretend sobriety is some magical fucking Hallmark movie where the urge evaporates forever.”
He swallows the bitterness on his tongue wishing—not for the first time—that he never picked up the needle in the first place.
“But this?” His grip on Jason’s shirt tightens painfully. “This felt like a whole different fucking universe of bad.”
His chest stutters around the next inhale, “I had nothing to stop it this time—and it scares me.”
Jason moves firmly for the first time since pulling Roy into his lap, just enough to tip the redhead's chin up with two fingers.
His eyes pin Roy in place.
“What do you mean,” Jason asks quietly, “stop it?”
Roy wishes very suddenly for the earth to split him open—or for some dimensional being to pull him from existence.
He looks away, only for Jason’s fingers to follow, stubbornly guiding his face back.
“How do you usually stop the cravings, Roy?”
Heat crawls viciously up his neck—he can feel the embarrassment and grief tangling into one awful knot.
“I…” Roy starts, then stops.
Fuck—
There is no graceful way to confess to your boyfriend that your coping mechanisms are a dumpster fire of burning yourself out or fucking random people till you lose all sense of self to the oblivion of endorphins.
“Keeping busy usually,” he settles on, pursing his lips. “Talking. Activity. Patrol.”
Jason waits, sensing there's more.
Roy groans softly and drops his forehead back to Jason’s shoulder.
“Sex,” he admits into the cotton. “Lots of sex.”
Jason goes still beneath him.
Roy rushes on before he can think too hard about that reaction.
“Usually if I find something loud enough, painful enough, physical enough, I can get my head to stop craving for a little while. Doesn’t have to be healthy… it just needs to be—distracting.”
He exhales shakily, “Anything louder than the urge.”
Jason’s hand tightens at the base of his skull.
“It just didn’t work this time,” he whispers, eyes stinging. “And I’m so fucking sorry—I just—” Roy curses under his breath and sits up just enough to meet Jason’s gaze fully. “I just wanted one goddamn minute where my brain wasn’t eating me alive. Where my skin wasn’t itching and my heart wasn’t beating out of my chest.”
Silence greets him as he finishes—Roy can practically hear the gears turning in his head.
“Why didn’t you talk to me?” Jason asks finally, brushing a thumb once beneath his ear. “Was that why you wanted to fuck that night?”
Roy flinches even though there’s no accusation in it. Which somehow makes the shame worse.
He nods once—it’s small.
Humiliating.
“I know it’s stupid,” he says immediately. “I know it’s not healthy.”
Roy’s voice shakes with the effort to keep the words flowing, “But sometimes it’s… the only way to… stop being inside my own head for a while.”
He wipes angrily at the still flowing tears at his face.
“I didn’t want to drag you into it.”
Jason’s brows pull together.
“My past addiction isn’t something you should have to shoulder, Jay. That’s not—”
“Roy.”
The single word cuts cleanly through him.
Jason shifts, one hand leaving Roy’s neck only long enough to cup his jaw and force eye contact again.
“Regardless of whether I wanted to have sex,” Jason says, voice low and brutally steady, “you are never alone in this.”
Roy’s chest jumps with a barely contained sob, Jason’s thumb drags once over the wet skin of his cheek.
“You have never left me alone to deal with my demons,” he says, leaning closer and pressing his forehead to Roy’s. “You do not get to decide I shouldn’t have to shoulder yours.”
Roy feels whatever’s left of his composure give way completely.
His lower lip trembles, throat so tight he’s surprised he’s even breathing.
Jason’s next words are softer.
“But yes,” he adds, because he is still Jason and Roy’s boyfriend is incapable of letting sincerity exist without one ounce of blunt sarcasm, “that does explain why you tried to seduce me immediately after witnessing a traumatizing medical tragedy.”
A startled, wet laugh bursts out of Roy before another sob can.
Jason catches both.
Holding him through each one until Roy’s breathing starts to lose that jagged, panicked edge and turns into something shakier, more exhausted than frantic.
For a long moment neither of them says anything further.
Roy just listens to Jason’s heartbeat and tries very hard not to dissolve into the floor.
Eventually though, Jason shifts enough to look down at him.
“Lian know anything?”
Roy’s eyes squeeze shut.
Not this conversation too.
He scrubs a hand over his face.
“She knew I looked wrong,” he mutters. “I sent her to Donna yesterday before this got…” Roy gestures vaguely around the demolished bedroom. “…dramatic.”
Jason’s jaw flexes, but he nods all the same, reaching into his pocket with one hand, still keeping the other anchored on Roy’s back. He fishes his phone out of his pocket with little struggle.
Roy watches blearily as Jason types one-handed.
Jason: Can Lian stay with you through tomorrow? Rough weekend. Will explain later.
Three dots appear almost immediately, and Roy’s never been more thankful for his old friend until that very second.
Donna: Already making waffles :)
Donna: She’s a-ok here!
Donna: You two okay?
Jason’s thumbs move quickly.
Jason: Working on it. Thanks.
He pockets the phone again like the entire extension of childcare logistics is the least complicated thing in the world.
Roy stares at him, throat tight.
“Thank you.”
It’s all he can manage. Jason presses a soft kiss to his hairline.
“Yeah,” he murmurs. “Of course.”
Roy swallows another cry, as Jason braces both hands on his shoulders.
“We gotta get you up though.”
The redhead blinks then looks around at the disaster zone that used to be their bedroom, then back at Jason, then back at the door frame.
He groans dramatically, going completely boneless in his boyfriend’s lap.
Jason gives him a flat look.
“Roy.”
There is no world in which the tone he is using ends with Roy winning, so he relents in letting Jason haul him upright to his feet.
When they stumble towards the island bar—Jason deposits him into the bar stool. Roy slumps immediately forward onto the countertop, muttering into the crook of his elbow,
“You may now leave me here to decompose.”
Jason snorts, dropping a cool water bottle onto the back of his neck.
Roy jerks up from the sudden temperature drop, which Jason uses to shove the water bottle into his grip.
“Drink,” Jason orders, standing expectantly in front of Roy with his arms crossed across his chest.
Roy obeys mostly because he lacks the strength for a compelling argument.
He cracks the seal and allows the cool water to coat his dry throat—it hits his stomach like a rock, and Jason only disappears back to the bedroom when he’s swallowed half of it.
For several minutes Roy just sits there and listens.
There are cabinet doors closing.
Drawers sliding back in.
The rustle of paperwork being restacked.
The rolling of a vacuum cleaner over hardwood.
There’s something absurdly stabilizing about listening to Jason put the apartment back together. It feels domestic in a way Roy still does not quite know how to survive.
By the time Jason returns, Roy knows the orange bottle is gone.
Disposed.
Removed entirely from the apartment in some way, but so are the scattered receipts, the upturned drawers, all the glaring evidence of one of Roy’s worst hours.
Jason sets a plate in front of him—it’s the takeout they ordered for an early dinner.
Roy stares at it. Suddenly hit with the realization that he’s starving, but when he picks up the fork and stabs it into the bowl of lo mein, his hands are still shaking so violently the food slides right off.
Jason narrows his eyes in Roy’s peripheral, but the redhead is determined to not need any more help, so with a deep breath he tries again.
And again.
And again.
It takes several minutes longer than usual for Roy to finish his food, and Jason—a man known to wolf food down in seconds—only eats when Roy does.
After they’ve eaten Jason herds him—there is really no other word for it—to the couch.
Roy goes willingly this time, body suddenly leaden with the sort of exhaustion that settles in only after adrenaline has burned itself out.
Jason drops onto the cushions first, grabs the throw blanket from the back, and jerks his chin.
“C’mere.”
Roy hesitates exactly long enough to pretend he has some semblance of dignity.
Then he folds down on top of Jason like his bones have given up holding him up.
He tucks his face into the side of Jason’s neck and breathes in—the smoky vetiver and amber musk at Jason’s throat hits Roy like oxygen. More so when Jason’s arm wraps around his back and tugs him closer, the other reaching for the remote.
“What are we watching?” Roy mumbles into Jason’s neck.
“Ideally something profoundly stupid.”
Roy hums just as a sitcom theme song starts—some canned laughter comes seconds later after somebody on screen says something stupid.
Roy doesn’t really process any of it.
The only things that seem to matter are Jason’s fingers combing slowly through his hair. The steady rise and fall of his breathing beneath him.
I don’t deserve this.
The thought tries to rise—tries to spiral, but Jason’s finger scrapes gently at his scalp and it fizzles before even getting far.
Roy lets himself be quiet for a second, listening to the sitcom laugh track babble uselessly in the background.
At some point the shaking stopped—he hadn’t even noticed.
More startling than that—when he breathes in now, the apartment smells like lemon cleaner and their Chinese takeout.
Not bleach. Not burnt chemicals.
Just home.
Roy’s throat tightens.
He tips his face farther into Jason’s neck for one quiet second before his boyfriend reaches over to tug the blanket higher around his shoulders for what has to be the third time.
Roy blinks.
“Oh my God.”
“Mm?”
“You really are going to fuss over me all night, aren’t you?”
“Yes,” Jason’s reply comes immediately.
A laugh slips out of Roy before he can stop it.
“Saint,” he mutters.
Jason slides his hand back into Roy’s hair.
“Unfortunately.”