#speedy dc

The rain over Star City came down in icy needle-like torrents, crashing down on the neon-lit concrete of the docks and making it hard to see for anyone caught out in the storm. But for Roy, the rain wasn't the problem. The problem was the noise in his own head—the constant, clawing itch under his skin that had been steadily building.

Six months. Five months and twenty-eight days, to be exact. That was how long he had been clean. It was a milestone anyone else would celebrate, but today, it felt like a prison sentence. The yearning in his veins was screaming, demanding for him to just give in, and Roy was running out of ways to drown it out.

So, he chose violence.

When word hit the wire that Cheshire was moving a shipment of experimental high-grade weaponry through the shipping yards, Roy hadn't waited for backup. He hadn't thought it through. He had just grabbed his bow and ran, chasing the only other thing that could make his heart race enough to satisfy the craving: adrenaline.

You had followed him, because that is what you always did. When the rest of the team had given up, when Oliver had turned his back, when Roy was sweating through night terrors and screaming at you to leave him to rot in a dilapidated apartment—you had stayed.  Six months of cold sweats, of holding him through the violent tremors of withdrawal, of taking verbal blows that cut deeper than any blade, only to stay by his side until the fever broke. You knew it was the addiction talking, not the boy you grew up loving. And now, he was finally clean. He had fought like hell to get clean.

But tonight, his recklessness was hitting a fever pitch.

"Roy! Fall back! We’re outnumbered!” you yelled into your comms, your boots skidding on the wet tarmac as you ducked under a stray throwing knife that one of Cheshire’s goons sent towards you. The blade hissed through the freezing, torrential downpour, slicing clean through a rogue strand of your hair before burying itself deep into the rusted metal of a nearby shipping container. The impact rang around you , but you barely heard it over the roaring of your own blood in your ears and the deafening sound of the storm.

Through the driving rain and the flashing glare of a faulty floodlight above you, you saw him vault over a stack of steel crates. He fired a rapid succession of trick arrows, the explosive payloads detonating in bright bursts of heat and sound against the shipping containers. The concussive blasts sent mercenaries flying, but Roy didn't stop to assess the damage. He dropped down into the center of the remaining group, using his bow as a staff to strike, parry, and kick with a manic kind of speed. He was overextending, purposely leaving his defences open just to force himself to react at the very last second, trying to force his brain to dump enough endorphins to mimic the high he was starving for. He was playing chicken with a knife edge, chasing a high that could never compare to the first, but desperate enough to try anyway.

"I've got it under control!" Roy’s voice snapped back over the comms channel. It wasn't the voice of Arsenal, the seasoned hero. It was laced with an ugly, defensive, razor-sharp edge that made your stomach instantly drop into a bottomless pit. It was the exact same tone he used when he got into those moods—the dark, suffocating regressions where the walls built back up and he viewed the entire world as an enemy. He ducked under a sweeping strike from a mercenary’s knife, the wind of the near-miss whistling over his microphone, before bringing the heavy riser of his bow up to crack the man across the jaw with a sickening crunch. "Just stay out of my way!"

"Roy, you're not listening to me! You're going to get yourself killed!" you shouted, throwing your entire weight forward. An assassin had emerged from the haze of the explosion, raising a submachine gun and aiming it squarely at Roy's completely exposed blind spot. You didn't think. You slid across the rain-slicked ground, your leg sweeping out to hook behind the mercenary’s ankles. He went down hard, his skull bouncing off the wet tarmac with a dull thud, the gun skittering away into a puddle.

You scrambled back to your feet, wiping a mixture of rain and sweat from your eyes, before looking back up at the red-clad archer. "You're chasing the rush, Roy! Look at yourself! Look at how many of them there are! Fall back so we can regroup!"

That struck a nerve. It tore through his mania and hit the raw, bleeding nerve of his pride.

Roy spun around entirely, abandoning the fight for a split second. His chest was heaving from the exertion and anger. The torrential rain had slicked his red hair flat against his forehead. His hands were shaking but it wasn't from fear; you knew him too well to ever mistake his shaking for fear. It was the sheer, overwhelming exhaustion of fighting his own mind.

"You don't know what the hell you're talking about!" he roared. "Stop treating me like some kind of patient! I am fine!"

"You're not fine!" you pleaded, stepping toward him, your hands slightly raised in a gesture that was half-surrender and half-begging. You were desperate to pierce through the thick wall of defiance he had thrown up. "Roy, please—"

"I said, back off!" he snarled, the sound feral and dripping with a bitter animosity that sounded like he was back at the worst nights of his withdrawal. He turned his back on you and lunged straight toward the center of the docks—straight toward Cheshire herself.

The assassin was perched atop a triple-stacked shipping container, watching the bloody chaos below with a cruel, deeply amused smirk playing on her lips. Her gaze was set on Roy, watching him not as a threat, but as a fascinating, broken toy spinning out of control.

“I don't need a babysitter, and I don't need you holding me back!” Roy’s voice echoed through the comms. His words cut deep into your chest. “If you're too scared to finish this, get the hell out of my way!"

The words stung, a familiar, poisonous echo of the insults he used to hurl at you when he was sweating through the sheets of that dilapidated apartment, trying to claw his own skin off to get to the itch beneath. It was the voice of the addiction trying to isolate him, trying to push away the only person who cared enough to stay. But as much as the words sliced into you, you didn't have the luxury of time to process the hurt.

Roy fired three arrows in rapid succession, pulling the string back with a violent, jerky motion. But the subtle tremor in his hands betrayed him; the trajectory was off by inches. Cheshire didn't even have to use her full speed; she dodged them effortlessly, twisting her body with feline grace before vaulting down from the container, her twin, poison-tipped daggers unsheathed and gleaming in the strobe of the floodlight.

Roy engaged her instantly, completely consumed by the absolute tunnel vision of the fight. The world outside of Cheshire’s blades ceased to exist for him. He was so focused on trying to match her speed, that he completely ignored his periphery, remaining deaf to the surrounding environment.

He didn't see the heavy-set mercenary slipping out from the shadows cast by the massive loading crane behind him. The man was huge, moving silently, as he pulled a  serrated combat knife from his vest, stepping directly into Roy's blind spot while Roy was locked in a desperate blade-against-bow struggle with Cheshire.

"Roy, behind you!" your yell tore through your throat, raw and frantic, but it was swallowed by a sudden crack of thunder.

He didn't look. In his desperation to score a hit on Cheshire, he merely pushed her back with a rough shove of his forearm, throwing a reckless, over-committed punch with his right hand. The movement pulled his upper body forward, leaving his entire right flank and lower back completely, fatally exposed to the assassin creeping up from behind.

The mercenary lunged, his weight shifting forward as he aimed a lethal, downward thrust directly for the base of Roy’s unprotected spine.

There wasn't time to yell another warning that he wouldn't hear. There wasn't time to draw a weapon. There was only the terrifying reality that the boy you grew up loving, the boy you had spent six agonizing months pulling back from the dead, was about to be snuffed out in front of you.

You threw yourself across the wet asphalt. Your boots lost all traction on the wet concrete, and you converted your momentum into a desperate, flying tackle, your body launching through the rain. You slammed your hands and shoulder directly into Roy’s torso, using every single ounce of strength and adrenaline in your body to shove him forcefully out of the knife's trajectory.

The sudden impact sent Roy sprawling sideways into the dirt and pooling water, his bow slipping from his fingers and clattering away across the tarmac.

But before he could even register the rush of cold mud against his face, before the flash of furious irritation at being pushed could even form in his mind, a sickening, wet sound echoed through the noise of the rain. It was immediately followed by a sharp, choked gasp.

The heavy, serrated blade meant for Roy's spine had found a home in your shoulder instead, tearing deep and unyielding through leather, muscle, and tissue until it struck bone.

Time seemed to fracture, splitting into agonizingly slow, jagged fragments. The world lost its sound, save for the heavy, rhythmic thud of your own decelerating heartbeat. For a fraction of a second, you didn't feel pain—only a strange, vacuum-like emptiness where the steel had entered your flesh, followed by a sudden bloom of white-hot heat that radiated down your spine and stole the oxygen right out of your lungs. The mercenary, unbothered by the swap in targets, callously wrenched the serrated blade backward to strike again, the wet drag of the metal tearing further at the wound.

The sheer horror of the sight unlocked something primal, dark, and terrifyingly sober in Roy. The manic, chemical fog that had clouded his brain evaporated in an instant, leaving behind a cold, crystalline reality. With a guttural, animalistic roar that tore at his vocal cords, he lunged from the mud. He didn't reach for his bow; his hand flew straight to the combat knife at his thigh. He moved with a terrifying lethality born of absolute panic, driving his blade straight into the vulnerable seams of the mercenary's heavy body armour, delivering a strike so brutal, it sent the massive man crashing completely unconscious into the pooling water of the tarmac.

Cheshire, standing just a few feet away, paused. She saw the sudden, violent shift in Roy's posture—the reckless desperation of a man chasing a high replaced instantly by the cold, unhinged, and murderous intent of a protector who had nothing left to lose. Recognizing that the shipment was no longer worth the price of a feral Arsenal, she stepped backward into the gloom, her green eyes flashing once through the dark before she retreated entirely, vanishing like smoke into the labyrinthine shadows of the shipping containers.

But Roy didn't care about the escape. He didn't care about Cheshire, or the weapons shipment, or the Team, or the six months of agonizing progress he had just risked on a phantom craving. The entire universe narrowed down to a single, bleeding point on the wet ground.

"No, no, no... please, God, no," Roy stammered, his voice losing all its edge, breaking into a ragged, frantic chant. He dropped to his knees as he threw his arms out, catching you just as your knees buckled and your strength gave out entirely, pulling your collapsing, shivering body directly into his lap.

The blood was warm—terrifyingly warm against the freezing torrents of the rain—and it was blooming rapidly across your chest, a dark, visceral crimson that stained his hands and soaked through the fabric of his uniform. The contrast of that heat against the icy downpour made him lose his breath.

"Hey, hey, look at me," Roy begged, his hands hovering over the wound in a panicked frenzy before he pressed them flat against your shoulder, trying desperately to hold your life inside your body. His voice was completely stripped of all the anger, all the defensive bravado, and the toxic pride that had driven him all night. It left behind only a terrified, broken boy who was suddenly very aware of how fragile the world was. "Look at me, sweetheart. I need you to stay with me. Do you hear me? Keep your eyes open. Just focus on me."

"Roy..." your voice was barely a breath, your eyelashes heavy with rain and the crushing weight of fading consciousness. The neon lights of the docks were beginning to bleed together into long, fractured streaks of colour, and the cold was moving inward, settling deep into your chest. Your fingers twitched against the wet leather of his suit, trying to ground yourself, but the darkness was pulling hard at the edges of your mind.

"Don't close them, don't you dare close them," he sobbed, his chest heaving as a full-blown panic attack choked his throat. He pressed down harder on the wound, a ragged, desperate sound escaping him as he rocked you slightly in the rain. Tears mixed with the storm on his cheeks, dripping down onto your face. "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. I did this. Stay with me, please... I can't do this without you."

“I—“

"Don't talk. Don't say anything, just breathe," he pleaded, his hands trembling violently against your torn shoulder. His chest heaved as the tears finally tracked distinct, warm paths through the grime on his face. "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. I was angry, I was craving, I—I wasn't thinking.”

"Not... your fault," you managed to whisper. The words cost you a staggering amount of energy, your vision tunnelling down until the only thing left in the world was the dark, tortured shape of his face. Even now, bleeding out on a the rain-slicked pier, your first instinct was still to protect him from the crushing weight of his own guilt.

"It is my fault! It's entirely my fault!" he choked out, his forehead dropping down to rest against yours, his breath hot, ragged, and frantic against your cold skin. The physical contact was the only thing keeping him anchored, his mind spinning out at the terrifying volume of blood slicking his fingers. "God, I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. I was being stupid. I was being a selfish, reckless bastard. Please, just hang on."

He scrambled for his comms unit with one bloody hand, his fingers smearing crimson over the transmitter as he forcibly patched directly into the Watchtower’s emergency frequency. His voice cracked into the comms line. "This is Arsenal! I need an emergency medical evac at the Star City north docks! Right now! They're bleeding out, do you hear me?! Move!"

He dropped the comm into the pooling water, not waiting for a response, and brought both hands back to press against your shoulder with a desperate, heavy force. The pressure flared through your fading nerves, causing you to groan weakly and instinctively try to pull away from the pain.

But he held you tight, refusing to let you slip into the dark. He gathered you closer into his arms, pulling your head up securely against his chest, right over his racing heart.

"I've got you," he whispered frantically, his voice a broken, trembling rasp against your hair. He rocked you slightly, his entire frame shuddering as he fought the suffocating panic clawing at his throat. "You've been holding me together for six months. You can't leave me now. I can't do this without you. Please. I need you to stay."

For months, you had been his anchor, pulling him back from the edge of a self-destructive abyss when the rest of the world had written him off. Now, as the brilliant crimson and blue lights of the incoming rescue vehicle finally broke through the blinding downpour, reflecting in fractured, dancing ripples across the puddles around you, Roy held onto you like a drowning man clutching his final lifeline.

The frantic itch in his veins was completely gone, replaced by a devastating clarity.  There had never been a rush in the world worth losing you for. He didn't need to chase a phantom rush to feel alive—the only high he ever truly needed was the moments he had with you by his side.