Something tips over inside of him, a wave folding into sea foam, and for a moment that feels an awful lot like reprieve from the charade between them, he can only feel Roy's hand, calloused and strong and there like a lifeline, like he could trust it to be without thought, digging into his forearm, dislocating his wrist but not letting go. Dick's own body grappling against the oil slick plane of a window scape, feet treading on air, caught in a crossfire without a grapple. He had not remembered Roy being there, but of course he was, when he needed him.
He remembers the way his body goes crashing onto the roof, guarded behind a simpering, sagging HVAC next to Roy and without relief, because relief would have implied doubt, and in those days, there had not been space for doubt between them. Royβs eyes, like flashes of green fire, warm, molasses light through a marsh, back when they looked at each other head on, not through refractions of emotion and sideways glances. Roy blushing with exertion, his glistening throat, his tracheae shifting with a heavy swallow.
Dick had laughed, the bray of a hyena and pressed his forehead against Roy's heavy shoulder, the near death experience somehow comical in the way it had felt like a stage play. Roy had never let him fall before, and Dick wanting to be wanted, a habit he had never kicked, sunk beside him in the rain, back against concrete like he'd never been more comfortable a day in his life.
He should be talking, shouldn't he? He should be dazzling and quick witted and griping back at him, doing his fair share of the heavy lifting to add some levity to the situation.
Dick's eyes pull from the mirage outside his window, away from a rooftop, entirely average in its presence. A roof was just a roof. The rain nothing more. Roy is standing inside, both safe from the downpour and it was true, that stillness often paralyzed him, but Roy moving in his home is motion enough, if not to relax, than to grow taut at the mementos of time past littered around the living room. He is suddenly sick on terror, not from his own nose clotting and leaking puce down his throat, but that Roy might sniff out his sentimentality like a blood hound, rub his face in it, the archer's hoodie stuffed in a blanket chest next to the television, his old shampoo, bottle beaded in dust beneath the sink. Time bombs of Roys belongings like infidelity to his indifference.
Or maybe Roy would find them, and then his smile would turn genuine and that was worse. Worse because it reaches his eyes, crinkles at the corners, terrible because it always makes Dick stupid. Terrible because it felt like years since he'd seen it. It makes him forget, mainly, everything that came before and all that is sure to follow after. Makes him forget that beyond that small (and when had it gotten so small? a life between them just a moment beforeβ) separation severing them lies nothing but heartache.
It is what it is and itβs silly, really, to be nervous still after all this time, after everything they have done to each other, done without each other, after every tremendous horror of himself Dick has revealed to Roy over the years, practically begging for abandonment, for Roy to cut his losses. It is silly and still the fear remains. More than that, it expands, swollen and unshakable, lodging in Dickβs throat where he's forced to choke on it. To his credit, he does his best to allow the man through the bulk of the order on the phone.
"Roy," he hisses suddenly, his face too hot when he turns his cheek to press against the cushion, rolls his eyes up and back to look at him despite the unnatural angle, one eye startling blue, the whites of the later swollen and red from the hemorrhaged capillaries. He doesn't know why he says his name like that, like there's still a chance Roy will catch him.
"I think I'm going to be sick."
