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The first kiss is a mistake.
Wires getting crossed. The onset of adrenaline, its subsequent crash. Nightwing’s competence, Dick’s magnetism.
And always—
Roy’s compass heart.
---
For a moment, they stand there— suspended in a stalemate of silence. It itches, taking on a half-life and scurrying up the length of his arms, burrowing deep inside his shoulders. A postcard of longing.
“We’ve kissed before,” Roy offers when he realizes Dick won't.
Dick just stares at him. Sunbeam scrutiny. Roy has no idea what to do with it. He never has. Not when they were close as anything, trading secrets in the refuge of the Tower.
Now? They trade blows.
“Yeah,” Dick grits out.
It's always an adjustment— how beautiful Dick is. You’d think such prolonged familiarity would make him more immune.
Dick’s face ripples. Oil on water, refracting Roy’s own desperation into something just as wretched. “I just— I… I didn’t remember. I didn’t remember what kissing you was like.”
Robin, Roy thinks, heart clenched.
He can’t help it. He’s swooping in, white-knuckled desire around the holster for Nightwing’s escrima sticks—
The second kiss? Well, the less said about it, the better.
His mouth pressed to Dick’s, nowhere as composed as he wants. Dick follows along, pliant— and for a second— for a singular and agonizingly brilliant second, Roy lets himself imagine— a world where Dick Grayson loves him the way he wants. The desire cleaves through him with a force so explosive that he shudders. Dick’s hands splay across his vest— like he’s pressing against the damage. Containing the bleeding. Triage for Arsenal, over and over and over.
“So you’re saying you missed me, hmm?” he murmurs, fingers deftly unzipping the suit. Dick’s eyes track his hands, butter-soft and there’s a flash of admiration as Roy gets him out of the suit with seemingly practised ease.
“Did I say that?” Dick teases, but it’s moot because he’s pressing hot open-mouthed kisses against Roy’s jaw, tugging down the under-shirt with determination to expose the hollow of his throat—
“Rob,” he groans, distracted.
Dick just smiles at him winningly: a dark, gleaming thing. It goes straight to his bones. No chaser.
“What do you want?” Dick breathes out, a thready little sound against the skin of his neck.
Blindingly—
The same thing I always want. That thing I can never have.
The third kiss is a wildfire, tendrils of flame curling through him. Dangerous and entrancing. It leaves him weak at the knees, thighs cinched. Can Dick feel his pulse racing? Does he even have any idea of what he does to Roy?
“Whatever you want to give,” he answers, half-truthful. The underbelly of his desire bared open to the knife of Dick’s love.
You just have to take the leap.
Dick taught him that.
---
Grace immediately picks up on it during the next mission.
“So, you finally fucked away all that sexual tension, huh?”
Roy doesn’t dignify her with an answer. Doesn't know what he could ever say to that.
(Once is a mistake, twice is a coincidence but thrice is the blueprint of ruin.)
---
Roy may have been the one to take the leap but it’s Dick who goes all in. Like he has single-handedly decided that if they’re finally doing this, then there’s no other way for it to be. And just as Dick is wont to do, he chases it with steel determination.
The Greeks describe aponia as complete physical katastematic pleasure. Most days, Roy wants to believe it. But then—
The bloodied metamorphosis of a soft touch into a violent devouring: teeth and tongue molten, hips frantically pitched—
“Jesus, Dick. Slow down,” Roy gasps out.
The authoritative undertone has Dick going bonelessly static. Body coiled with tension but eyes glazed. Unease festers like rot. The shock has him almost blurting out something he won’t be able to take back but—
Dick is a flighty thing.
(There is something seriously wrong with you.
I know. But that’s why you like this, remember?)
Someone who has never seen an arrow might mistake it for a spear.
“I didn’t mean we have to stop entirely,” he jokes, but he thinks— no, he knows— there’s an edge to it. One he has no doubt that Dick will pick up on.
He’s never been as good as Dick at pretending.
If Roy was a better person, a better friend, hell— a better teammate, he would ask about it now. Break their suspended haze of lust. Take no prisoners.
But the moonlight snaking in, the fractured respites of New York silence, the sinews of Dick’s quadriceps poised mid-motion; it’s all a fever dream. Sticky with desire, incandescent with a lack of belief. Nothing will ever be bearable again.
“Flip over,” he commands.
Dick moves like water.
---
Dick quits the team. Dick comes back. Roy stays gone.
---
This is what grates: Dick’s pantomime of deconstructed loneliness.
This is what grates: Roy’s animal desperation to make him stay.
“You’re bitchier than usual,” Roy grunts, hips snapping furiously.
Dick’s neck, the long lines canted silk-soft— a predator playing at prey, “Am I? Maybe this is just what I look like when you’re around.”
Roy scoffs. Licks into his mouth syrup-smooth. A heady blood-rush when Dick bites back.
“Big talk from someone who crawled through my window at 3 am.”
And then because he’s Roy Harper, because pressing on their shared bruise has become habit, because there’s no fixing stupid, “Desperation isn’t a good look on you, Shortpants.”
Dick doesn’t respond. Instead, his eyes flutter shut, mouth parted in exhilaration. Getting off to the way Roy is buried in him? Getting off to the poison of Roy's words?
He doesn't want to know.
Instead, he soundlessly fucks Dick into the mattress.
---
Ollie oscillates like a pendulum. Mentor, father, debtor. The halcyon tether of Speedy and Green Arrow, the frayed strings of everything else.
Today, he is firmly paternal. Fretting over Mia’s new team, exaggeratedly caustic about his funding injection into the Outsiders, stubbornly ignorant of Connor’s worry.
“He’s Bruce’s kid. You don’t grow up under Batman’s shadow and come out unscathed.”
“He was Bruce’s ward before he was his kid,” Roy points out, a little mean for it.
Ollie looks chagrined but mollifying has never been his way, even for Roy.
“I’m just saying… it’s difficult to love someone who won’t let you in.”
The conspicuous absence of Gene Kelly records in the Queen household.
(The problem, Roy thinks, is that everyone in his life seems to think self-sabotage is self-control. Meanwhile, Roy’s never met a mistake he didn’t love.)
“Loving him isn’t the problem,” Roy sighs. It’s everything else.
---
Roy’s mouth tracing the new bruises, Dick’s fingers tangled in his hair. Feather-winged. And then— tight, tight, tight. A lifeline to drowning.
Why do you insist on being alone, Rob? You can have anyone you want—
You can have anyone you want. All you have to do is ask.
This is the fundamental difference between them. People stick around the next morning for Dick. It burns— the easy, martyred way Dick bypasses the reassurances of the people in his life who want him to be okay.
Nobody does evasion like Nightwing.
Dick’s hand stills.
“You good?”
Cautiously neutral.
Roy feels like the wind has been knocked out of him. His bloodied paw clawing at a bigger, untameable beast.
Dick pulls back.
“What’s wrong?”
The gut-punch at how quickly Dick moves from desire to detective, lust to logic. How much of it had even been real, Roy thinks, stomach sinking? How much was just an act? Dick playing up a role, returning some misconceived favour that he thought he owed to Roy?
When did Dick pick this up?
The horrifying way he treats his body. A tool to be wielded. Just another expendable thing in his arsenal.
(Roy knows all about weapons you turn into yourself.)
“Why are you using me to hurt yourself?”
Dick’s stoicism falls away like a dream, all that earnest boy-scout sincerity resurfacing like a sunken boat— that is to say: not at all. Just another performance. A better one.
Roy’s never been one for showmanship.
---
“Is Uncle Dick coming to my party?” Lian asks.
“I don’t know, sweetheart. I haven’t asked him yet.”
“He promised to teach me a back-flip.”
“Did he now?” Roy asks, amused despite himself.
“He said I had to practice my front-flip and if I got really, really good, he would teach me more.”
“And when did he promise this?” Roy questions, hope senselessly burgeoning.
“When he got dinner for us that day. He looked really happy, Daddy. He looks so sad now.”
I know, baby.
---
“This isn’t like you,” Roy reminds him.
“What? Casual sex?” Dick drawls. He’s already tugging off his suit.
Roy stares. It never gets old— looking at Dick. Roy is only a man and most days, he’s not even a good one.
Still. He insists, “You don’t like no-strings-sex, Dick.”
“Doesn’t mean I can’t be good at it,” he says gamely before telegraphing a kiss. Roy follows along, hands cradling his thin face. You’re looking less and less like yourself, Rob.
Dick twists his head, mouth chasing Roy’s hand instead. And then— lips wrapped around his fingers, languidly sucking. Like Grace.
Roy stutters.
Blue eyes glassy, mouth hot; the beginnings of a grin— slow and easy and pleased. For one wild moment, Roy considers hitting Dick. Just to see what he will do.
But he doesn’t. He’s too terrified that Dick will let him.
“I want to suck you off,” he says instead, sinking to the floor till he’s level with Dick’s half-done suit.
Dick doesn’t fist his hair like usual. Roy almost wishes he would.
It would feel good to be pushed into the ground. It's where they belong.
---
A litany: recurring moments where Roy can’t decipher the look on his face, can’t cut to the heart, can’t solve the mystery of Dick Grayson.
The nights he has trouble going back to sleep after Dick kisses him goodbye. That awful feeling in his stomach that he has just done something very, very wrong.
Donna would have known.
---
“You’re an asshole, Harper. I know what you’re doing,” Dick snaps, judgement delivered, the weight of it looming.
A bang and a whimper—
Nightwing finally comes alive.
But that’s fine. Roy knows how to be repentant after drawing blood.
He’ll take it— Dick’s intrinsic aversion to losing control, his alternating but stunning pliability in bed. And now: his acid fury at being manipulated. A livewire thrumming with all the unrestrained energy that people keep trying to extinguish.
But at long last. Dick Grayson— here. Alive and furious and present.
Roy doesn’t let it faze him. “Do you?” he asks mildly.
A weapon is only a weapon in the hands of those that know how to wield it. Roy knows himself better as Arsenal than he ever did as Speedy.
Dick pulls him in for a bruise or a kiss— it doesn’t matter. As long as he’s not operating on autopilot, as long as he’s not chasing ghosts. As long as he wants this. As long as he wants Roy.
He keens, a wounded little thing. Fingers curled, tongues lapping vicious— sloppy and dirty— exactly what Dick wants even though Roy knows it’s not what he needs.
Patience is an archer’s greatest virtue.
(Sometimes, you play the long game.)
---
Except—
Roy wakes up the next morning, and besides the slight dip of the bed, the corners of the duvet folded in tidy pleats—
There’s no sign that Dick was ever here.