Lacey

But then he’d heard you, that day in the store.

The shrill cadence of your voice was a sound he’d only heard once before: when you were little and decided to climb up your uncle’s bookshelf, only for it to start tipping. It wasn’t you nearly getting hurt that had scared him the most; it was how quiet you’d been after, the way your eyes seemed to analyze everything before going near it.

It’s the same way you’re looking at him now, your eyes on his face, looking for something that is— or perhaps something that isn’t— there.

Hal doesn’t know what to say, and even if he did, Oliver’s dining table doesn’t seem like the best location for the conversation. So he sends you a warm smile instead.

When you smile back, he sees how it doesn’t reach your eyes. What he does see, though, is a flicker of hurt in your eyes as you glance around the table, your eyes settling on Lian for a beat longer than the rest of them before dropping down to your plate.

It’s not until the two of you get back home that he figures out just why that was, the realization hitting him like a brick.

Way to go, Hallie. He drags his hand down his face, cursing under his breath. Even when you try to fix things you screw it up. 

His gaze shifts to your closed bedroom door, where you’d retreated earlier. That had been a few hours ago.

He stands, finding himself knocking on your door before he even has an idea of what he’s going to say. Maybe he’ll just listen— that is, if you’re willing to talk.

When you don’t answer after he knocks a second time, he opens the door just enough to spot you, curled up in a ball in your bed, the blankets covering your face just enough that he can’t fully tell if you’re asleep.

His ring chimes before he can quietly inquire about your state, a communique summoning him to some far off planet. 

Just as well. You need your rest.

Hal’s just about to depart for the journey home when something on the planet’s surface catches his eye, small and glittering.

He scans it with his ring, looking at it for a moment longer before slipping it into his pocket and heading for home.

It’s early when he gets back. It’s so early, in fact, that he’s practically shocked to find you awake and milling about in the kitchen. You hadn’t been a morning person before.

Then again, you’d been a lot shorter before, too.

“You’re up early, kiddo.”

Hal flinches when you jump, the bowl of cereal in your hands crashing to the floor.

He hadn’t meant to scare you.

He joins you on the floor, picking up the broken pieces of the bowl as you fight to mop up the milk before it spreads. “Here, let me help—”

“I can take care of it myself!”

The acerbic delivery of your words is nothing short of a knife in the gut.

You had dealt with a lot on your own when he was gone. Life hadn’t exactly been fair to either of you when dealing out the cards. He hadn’t been able to help you then, so why would you want him to help you now?

“…alright.”

He disposes of the ceramic fragments, his hand finding its way to his pocket, feeling over the rough surface of the extraterrestrial stone he’d stowed away earlier.

“Brought you something,” he says, pulling the stone out of his pocket once you’ve got most of the mess cleaned up. “Found it on Driumia.”

He watches as you stare at it for several moments before you tackle him in a hug, nearly knocking him off balance. It’s not till he regains his footing that he notices the slight shake in your shoulders and the tears streaming down your cheeks and dampening his shirt.

“Hey,”  he says softly, running his hand over your hair. “It’s okay. We’ll be okay, hm?”

His words don’t seem to calm you, so he holds you a little tighter, a little longer.

Because he knows it’s only a matter of time ‘til he screws up again. That’s what he does best, after all.

And it’s only a matter of time ‘til you’ll hate him for it.

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Your eyes flicker from your half-finished plate to the faces across the expanse of stained wood, their expressions joyful as they chatter away about some topic you are not privy too. League business, probably, if the look of partial understanding on Oliver’s face at Roy and your father’s words is anything to go by.

You study their faces; first Roy’s, then your father’s. 

The freckles that’d adorned Roy’s face when you were younger had faded, replaced by a few barely formed wrinkles you assumed he’d gained throughout overcoming his struggles and the joy and stress that came with raising his daughter. (The same daughter who, at present, is trying to hide her peas under a small pile of mashed potatoes.)

Where Roy had wrinkles, your father had none. 

On the contrary, Hal looks young. Far too young. He looks the way he had when you were still a small child; running around without a care in the world, unaware of the horrors to come.

You hadn’t noticed how different he looks at first. You’d been so happy he was alive again; a real, living person and not some form of ghost you still didn’t fully understand. It wasn’t till you were out shopping that you realized just how much he’d changed. It had happened when an elderly woman asked you if Hal was your brother—the two of you had assisted her with reaching some higher up items, after which he’d wandered further down the aisle making you the only one aware of the assumption. 

You had laughed—the sound awkward, almost manic, too high-pitched to be considered normal—and corrected her. “No!” you’d said. “That’s my dad.” 

You’d started looking at him a lot closer after that. Noticing little things that were missing, like the scar on his hand from when he’d helped you build a mock gingerbread house out of cardboard and the knife jumped, nicking the side of his palm. 

It wasn’t just his features that had changed. His words had, too.

He didn’t call you bug anymore.

At first you thought it was because of the whole ‘possessed by an insectoid entity’ thing. (You’d made Kyle explain it all to you several times so you could finally have a semi-understanding of just what it was.) But then you’d heard him talking to Lian; the way the nickname had rolled so easily off his tongue like he’d been waiting to say it again, wanting to say it—just not to you.

There’s a little voice inside your head that tells you to move on, that it’s just a dumb nickname. It argues with another one, saying that your father’s still unsure how to interact with you after so long apart. A third voice, louder than the second, twists it’s words, leaving you wondering if he even wanted to be near you at all, or was just doing so out of some sense of obligation to your younger self.

It was so long ago, after all. And you’d changed, too—though you didn’t feel they were as drastic a change as whatever turned your father into… well, this semi-recognizable version of himself.

You really should let the nickname thing go.

But you still remember when he’d first called you that; how he laughed when you crinkled your nose at the thought of being a bug, and with exceptional patience explained to you about lanterns and lightning bugs and bioluminescence. You’d asked him a question as a joke: “Am I a lightnin’ bug ‘cause I light up your life?”

He’d chuckled, pressed a kiss to the top of your head and tucked you into bed. “You sure make it more interesting,” he’d said. And, as he did every night, regaled you with stories of his space adventures as you drifted off to sleep dreaming of the stars.

You inhale sharply, blinking away the hot tears that threaten to spill down your cheeks. Those memories feel so far away now.

You poke at your food, more for something to do than anything. When you do take a bite you barely take note of the taste, just swallow it down with the lump in your throat.

Once your father finally spots you looking at him, he smiles. But it doesn’t reassure you the way it used to. 

You offer a small smile back anyway.

Glancing around the room, seeing everyone converse and laugh with each other while you feel so out of place twists the proverbial knife in your gut.

Maybe it wasn’t your father that changed.

Maybe you were the problem.

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Dick:

Moving in with Dick Grayson has had its hiccups. 

He has the oddest sleep schedule known to man, for one, and every time he tries to cook anything beyond what a 13 year old can, it seems to end in smoke and sheepish apologies. 

Collectively, you now have more coffee mugs than you do forks, which speaks more to the amount of cutlery you’ve curated than it does to decorative mugs. 

Nothing however, in the two weeks you’ve been living together, could have prepared you for this. 

Nightwing stands in your bedroom, frozen in shock after having climbed through your window. You stand on the opposite side of your bedroom, the baseball bat Dick keeps by his bed clutched in your hands. 

“Woah, woah, I’m Nightwing, I’m one of the good—“

Nightwing is real?

“What the hell are you doing in my bedroom?”

And where the hell is Dick when you need him?

Nightwing raises his hands in surrender, a slightly-familiar sheepish grin on his face. “You’re not gonna hit me with that, are you?” He pulls out one of his own escrima sticks and tosses it on the bed, “at least use that, it’ll hurt more.”

You blink, unimpressed. “You’re not serious, are you?”

“Dead serious.”

Despite your trepidation, you lean forward and snatch the stick off the middle of the bed. You turn it over in your hands, examining it. 

Dick breathes a sigh of relief, happy his distraction worked. He’s dead tired, and he’d gotten sloppy on the way home when all he could think about was getting out of his suit and into bed with you. 

He didn’t even think about what he was doing until he’d slipped his second leg through the window only to be met with the sound of you shouting. He’d by lying if he said he wasn’t at least a little proud at how quick you were to get out of bed and start threatening the fully grown vigilante in your room. 

“If you’re done yelling,” he says cautiously, “I’ll just be going, I’m clearly in the wrong apartment.”

“The wrong—“ You laugh incredulously, “you don’t double check before breaking and entering?”

“Hey, you try doing this in the dark in the middle of the night.”

Your eyes roll. Dick’s never wished more that he could reach out and kiss you. 

“I’ll be taking that,” he says, reaching over the bed and grabbing his escrima stick from your hand. “Uh, maybe don’t tell anyone about this.”

“Embarrassed?”

“Something like that.”

And before you can say anything else, he’s maneuvering back through your window and disappearing into the night. You latch it tightly behind him before crawling back into bed, your heart still racing.  

Grabbing your phone, you start typing out a message to Dick. You’ll never believe what just happened to me. 

Jason:

You thought he was a myth. Some silly tale passed around from criminal to criminal like parents warning their children of the bogeyman. But if he’s a myth, then why is he standing in your living room?

 It was hard enough to come to terms with Batman being real, but seeing Red Hood in person is almost as absurd as if Santa Claus himself had broken into your house.

You hold your breath, pressed against the wall, the glass of water you’d snuck out of bed to grab clutched tightly in your hand. Your hands are shaking, your knees are shaking—fear wracks your whole body. And then the glass slips, shattering across the floor and spreading glass and water everywhere.

Any hope Jason had that you didn’t see him dies in his chest. Fuck.

“I’m not here to hurt you,” he says, and for once, he wishes his voice was just a little softer under the mask. 

“T-then why—“ You take a breath, trying to quell your fear. “Why are you in my boyfriend’s house?”

Jason wishes he had a better answer, something beyond ‘I’m a fucking idiot who didn’t think before I broke into my own house in full costume while you were there.’ He comes up empty.

“Jason is…” His own name sounds foreign on his tongue, “he left something here for me. He didn’t say anything about you being here.”

At the sound of your boyfriend’s name, you suddenly remember the glass of his you just broke and the water seeping into his nice floors. You drop to your knees, cupping your hands and trying to stop the spread of the water.

Red Hood is crossing the room in the instant, footsteps heavy so as not to startle you. “What the hell are you doing?” 

“Cleaning, I—I can’t believe I broke that.”

“You’re going to cut yourself,” he sighs, going to the kitchen and grabbing the roll of paper towel he keeps on the counter. He’s semi-grateful for your panicked state keeping you from questioning how he knew where that was. “Here, let me.”

And before you can argue against it, Red Hood starts soaking up the water with paper towel. When he’s satisfied the floors are dry, he gets to work on the glass, gloved hands carefully picking up every last shard and wrapping them in another piece of paper towel.

You can only stare in utter disbelief as Red Hood—the notorious anti-hero, this broad man who’d broken into Jason’s house—cleans up your mess as if it’s the must mundane thing in the world.

“T-thanks,” you stutter out, rising to your feet as the masked man discards the used paper towel in the trash. 

“Was my fault you dropped it anyways,” he mumbles out. “Tell Jason I’ll come back a different time.”

With that, he’s disappearing back into the shadows of the room, leaving back through the window he came from. You stand there, still shaking slightly, utterly shocked by what just happened.

You’re still standing there twenty minutes later when Jason runs through the door, having ditched his gear off with Bruce. He’s frazzled, a hand running through his messy hair. 

“Fuck, sweetheart, what are you still doing up?”

“Your—“ You swallow, looking at your boyfriend with equal amounts of excitement and fear. “Your friend stopped by.”

Tim: 

You’re watching Netflix when you hear the distinct scraping of your window opening. Illuminated by the light of your tv screen, you can just barely make out the face of Red Robin, sleepily sliding a leg through your window.

You blink, almost entirely unphased by the sudden appearance of the vigilante. “Um, are you here for me?”

His head snaps up, mouth falling open. Shit. Tim had been so tired, so out of it, he hadn’t even realized his brain was on auto-pilot to your apartment until you’d said that. Shit. 

He’s not sure whether he’s relieved or not by how unphased you are by a vigilante breaking into your house in the middle of the night. 

He scratches the back of his neck. “No..?”

You hum, your own tired brain working to interpret this information. “Okay,” you say simply.

“Okay?”

You nod, like it’s the simplest thing in the world. Tim fully commits, letting himself drop into your room and lean against your windowframe.

“You’re not gonna ask why I’m here, or..?”

“Are you here for something nefarious?”

“Well, no—“

You yawn, “then I don’t care. Do what you need to do.”

He mentally makes a note to talk to you tomorrow about stranger danger and what to do if someone breaks into your house in the middle of the night. For now, though, he’s slightly grateful for your nonchalance. He glances around your room, taking in the plushies you keep on your bed and the tv playing at half-volume, displaying a show a little too familiar to him.

“Shit, are you watching Voltron?”

“Rewatching,” you admit tiredly, finally sitting up in bed. “Are you a fan?”

And Tim suddenly wonders how this has never come up in all of your conversations with him. How is he just finding this out as Red Robin of all things?

“You could say that,” he laughs slightly.

Then you’re patting the bed, inviting him further into your room. Tim knows he shouldn’t, knows he has a dozen other things to look into tonight and yet, he finds himself settling in on the side of your bed he usually sleeps on to watch Voltron.

“What are you doing up so late, anyway?” 

You shrug, “was waiting for my boyfriend to text me but…”

Guilt pangs in his chest. He hadn’t realized he forgot to text you back until right now, his phone feeling heavy in the pocket he’d tucked it into. Tim kicks off his boots and fully leans against your bedframe.

He really shouldn’t be doing this. He knows it’ll only lead to more trouble for himself both as Robin and Tim Drake and yet, he can’t bring himself to leave.

“There’s snacks on my kitchen counter if you’re hungry. Soda in the fridge.”

“You’re feeding me after I broke into your house?” “Figured you work up an appetite running around the city,” you slide back down into bed, lazily splaying your limbs across the mattress. “Could probably use the extra fuel.”

Tim can only smile, “I guess I never thought of it like that.”

Wally:

Wally doesn’t realize his error until he’s skidding to a stop in his own living room only to be met with you, mid handful of popcorn, looking utterly shocked. Well, fuck.

He’s exhausted, lungs burning from all the running he’s done tonight, and the blood trickling down his side is definitely staining the carpet Iris and Barry had gifted in when he moved in. Double fuck.

“Are you—“ You tentatively rise to your feet, looking around as if you’re the one that’s in the wrong place. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah.” No.

Your eyes scan him, from the big logo on the middle of his suit to the hand he has clutched over the tear on his side that is definitely dripping blood all over Wally’s floors. You start towards him, equally concerned as you are flabbergasted. “You’re bleeding.”

“I’m—“ He takes a breath, a weak puff of air leaving his lips, “clearly in the wrong house.”

“You’re bleeding,” you repeat, and you’re so close now you can very visibly see the cut on his side. Nothing too deep or serious, but painful looking nonetheless. “Do you—I think my boyfriend has a first aid kit around here somewhere.”

Under the sink, Wally thinks. But he wouldn’t dare let you get too close to him right now, not when he’s sure you’ll be able to sniff out it’s him every moment. His heart pangs as he thinks of how awkward a conversation that’ll be.

Before he can say anything, you’re disappearing down the hall, coming back with the first aid kit lifted above your head like a trophy. Wally can’t help but smile a bit. You’re so damn cute.

You order him to sit on the couch, laying down a towel you’d stolen from his bathroom to keep him from making a mess. “I’ll try and be quick,” you promise. “But not all of us have super speed.”

“As long as it means you won’t maim me.”

You’re careful as you patch him up, gentle touches along his skin as you clean and disinfect the wound. Wally sits there, resisting the urge to pet your head and kiss your forehead. 

It’s a few minutes of oddly comfortable silence before you’re pulling away with a grin, gently patting the wound. “There,” you proclaim. “It’s not perfect, but it’ll feel a little better, at least until you can leave.”

“Thank you,” he says, rising to his feet and twisting his core. “It feels way better already.”

“Um, before you go,” you smile sheepishly. “Do you think—could I grab a picture with you?”

He raises a brow under his cowl.

“It’s just, my boyfriend is the Flash’s biggest fan, and I think he’d just really love to see proof of you in his apartment.” Your eyes widen slightly at the look on his face, “but if you’re too busy, I totally get that too. This is silly, actually, sorry for even—“

The Flash grabs your phone out of your hand, wrapping an arm around your shoulder and pulling you into his side. He’s quick to snap the picture, throwing up a peace sign before handing your phone back to you.

“Um, be careful out there.”

He laughs, “always am.”

He offers you a two fingered salute before he’s disappearing from your living room, leaving nothing but a trail of lightning in his wake. You smile at the picture on your phone, Wally is gonna freak.

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“Sorry, Adonis.” You bite the inside of your cheek to stop the laugh bubbling up inside you, though it does nothing to the grin spreading across your face. “I don’t think I can turn off the sun.”

His brow furrows. Adonis? His name’s Jon. Even in his half-asleep state he knew that.

A twinge of jealousy goes through him at the thought of someone else sleeping on your couch. “Who’s tha-?” He asks, his words interrupted by a yawn.

“Uh, a dead Greek guy? It’s just a way to say you look pretty, Jonny.”

“Oh.” He hums, face relaxing as his head settles back into the plush of the pillow, sleep once again pulling him under its spell. “Y’look pretty, too.”

You stand there for a minute, trying to ignore the warmth you feel spreading through your cheeks. “Thanks,” you stammer out quietly, moving away from the window to let Jon rest and get on with your day.

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