Archive of Our Own ^beta

Roy sends everyone away when he proves that he can wash dishes and care for Lian with the help of the nanny.

That’s when Jason comes.

“Make yourself at home.” Roy wheezes, unhappy to find someone uninvited in his kitchen at midnight.

Jason turns to show his oft-hidden face. He points a kitchen knife at the table like threatening its wood grains.

Roy smells stir fry: pork and soy and vegetables, the comfort of steaming rice. His sleeping stomach blinks hopefully. The chair is hard on Roy’s bones when he sits.

-

“Why are you always here?” Roy’s soft voice lifts from the bed to join the dim air.

Jason closes the dresser drawer and pivots to the laundry basket placed on the foot of the bed. Roy can feel the well the basket makes in the mattress suck him in. 

“Why the fuck would I leave you alone?”

“You don’t have…?”

“Nothing,” Jason confirms, piling pre folded t-shirts from the basket into the crook of one arm.

“I never fold those.”

The man in Roy’s bedroom ignores him. Roy watches Jason put the laundry away through his overslept weariness. He’s been so bored; the back and forth of Jason’s shape is at least something to study. Roy falls asleep without meaning to.

-

"Jason's helping around the house," Roy explains to Lian. 

“You need a nanny too,” Lian agrees. 

Jason frowns his smirk.

Dinah visits and Jason doesn't bother making himself scarce.

“He’s my. Uh.” 

Roy isn't sure how to explain that Jason used to screw Roy silly, and now sleeps beside him like a dog on guard, and fetches socks in his crushing teeth.

At the sink, scrubbing the breakfast skillet, Jason speaks up.

“I'm his nanny.”

Because Dinah Doesn't Know, she asks, “Are you ex-military?” 

“I’m more than qualified.” Jason lifts one soapy hand and wiggles his pinky like scratching the air. “Promise.”

Dinah squints a smile and wiggles her pinky in return. When Jason looks away to the sink, Dinah turns her scrunched nose on Roy. 

“That makes me feel so much better.” She enunciates every word. Now a stage whispered- “did the doctor clear you for pound town?”

“No and I don't plan on asking.”

“I'm sure it's fine.” Dinah sips her coffee. “It's fine, totally fine.”

-

Physical therapy wrings Roy out like a rag every time. A fractured nervous system vomits up sensation, ill categorized, poorly proffered, overwhelming. Roy misses the numbness of the first month, before the chemistry of near death had lifted like a veil at the altar of his new life.

Citizenship among the living promises Feeling Things.

In the aftermath of PT, Roy lays on the floor of the living room, digging the heels of his palms into his eye sockets. He can't even stand the dim light of the apartment.

Jason kneels beside him with a small trash can for the possibility of puke.

“I hate this.” 

“Stay calm,” Jason corrects him. 

“I’m so fucked.”

“It won't be like this forever.”

Roy lays in his darkness for long minutes breathing.

The nausea ends suddenly, a rubber band snapping. He’s cold with sweat.

“You good?” Jason asks as Roy peels his hands from his face. 

“No. No, I'm so…” Frustrated tears well over his temples and flood his ears. His face crumples.

The broad palm of Jason slides heavily along the sides of Roy's face, mopping up the tears with indelicate thoroughness. 

The outpouring doesn't end. Spit snaps between Roy's tongue and teeth when he opens his mouth to cry. His heart tears like wet tissue paper. He wishes Jenny had put his body in the fetal position when his bloody heart stuttered on the sidewalk months ago, and was never moved again.

-

“We’ll take it slow,” Dick promises. “I remember when I tore my ACL, it was so frustrating getting back in the gym.”

Roy understands that Dick is being sympathetic- but wants to bite, If only it was my ACL.

“I got a trainer,” Roy fibs. “I’ll hit you up soon though.”

They wade the New York City slush sidewalks in the draft of Jason's cigarette smoke. Dick has no idea they have a third wheel, how Jason keeps a disinterested pace with them

“I know it can be a slog. Getting back in shape.”

Roy pauses in their walk. To alleviate his heart rate, he eases into the seat of a park bench.

“I’m not in any kind of rush.” 

“We miss you.” Dick remains standing, hands in his jean pockets, watching over Roy where he rests.

That Jason doesn’t break his anonymous silence is a little funny.

-

Roy covers his sob like a cough inside his elbow, then pounds his palms together in applause. The shadowed school auditorium hides him from Lian on stage, but he’s calling to her in Diné bizaad, cuts it through every other voice to reach her proud little heart.

In her cardboard costume, his baby girl plays the best damn tree Off Broadway.

Roy cries because he almost missed this. His neck is soaking wet with tears.

-

A cold wind is all that moves inside of Roy sometimes. He is bad luck and a sour omen. No one should be around him, especially not his sunshine daughter.

Roy’s just not right anymore. Jason’s the only one Roy isn’t worried about cursing. 

“Definitely haunted,” he bitters at Jason, needing a reaction to this news other than empirical reassurance. Roy gets what he needs- Jason makes eye contact with the ghost eeking from Roy’s cells and nods.

They sit on Jason’s bed deliberating their radioactive souls, and whether their isotopes will ever finish decaying. Cut it in half, and in half again, and in half again.

“I’ll always have some death in me.”

“Doesn’t everyone?” Jason sniffs, not believing his own challenge. But he offers it, the thing that people who are Not Dying will say to someone who is: When do we start dying? The day we are born, of course. We’re all dying. 

Now, speak those words with a warm red mouth to a face with blue lips.

“But the death in me is different now. It’s expired. My death…died,” Roy winges, frustrated by the shackles of the English language to pin down his plight. He means that the balance has curdled and separated, chʼį́įdii has risen to the top and leaks out on everything. “I have a responsibility, I have to stay away from her.” Roy won’t even say her name.

Jason doesn’t argue, thankfully, and doesn’t plead with him to see Western reason for Lian’s sake. Roy is Lian’s Father. Roy is Lian’s Diné Father. Jason doesn’t overstep in the name of caring and lets Roy tend to his taboo soul, permitting Roy to haunt Jason’s apartment instead of the one Lian lives in.

After a time, Roy’s soul sloshes and mixes and the aura of undead fades enough for him to go home for another spell. The emulsion of all things lively and deceased inside him reaches equilibrium and Roy is back to dishes and parent-teacher conferences and physical therapy. Roy flees on some nights when he can’t grey-knuckle his ghost solo style, and goes to Jason’s to wrestle it back into his living clay cells. And then he’s back at Life again.

-

“No doubt …” Roy wets his lip, frustration running dry his mouth. The book squeaks in his grip. “No doubt your. Sword. Is beautiful. Is indeed a beautiful thing. It is a tribute to. To. To whoever forged it. In bygone ages.” An exhausted sigh, ill disguised as a yawn into Lian’s hair.

Jason’s warm palm continues its slow assuring glide across Roy’s shoulder, smoothing him. 

Haltingly, the three of them in bed, Roy practices his reading out loud, with finger plodding the progression. An exercise in humility. In patience. In love.

“There. Are. Very. FewSuchSwords. As this one left in the world. But remember, it is only a sword, Matthias!”

Roy is well aware that Lian has surpassed him as a reader. Or rather, he has relapsed to illiteracy. When he needs a break from the fighting text, his daughter takes up the gauntlet and recites the story with a notable difference of ease. 

Lian reads to her father in her gentle child’s voice. “ It contains no secret spell, no… Nor holds within its blade any magic power. This sword is made for only one purse… purpose , to kill. It will only be as good. Or evil. As the one who wills…. ”

“Wields.” Jason, who follows the story along while Roy rests his eyes. “Like: holds, or uses it.”

“Welds!”

“Wields. With an- ee . Weeee…”

“Wields!”

“Yes!”

Roy smiles where he leans back into Jason’s chest. They’re a pile on his bed, a sleepy matryoshka of Lian in Roy’s lap, and both of them happily treating Jason as a cozy cushion, pinning him to the headboard.

After a paragraph, Roy tags in for another attempt at Redwall. He sizes up the text and bears down on the part of his neurology that tries to jump out the back window of his brain in the face of the written word. His eyes judder across the page of back bending marks. A stiffening of Roy’s jaw intimidates the letters into groups, and then words, and then meaning.

-

Roy is better by the day.

It’s affecting Jason.

“Get out,” Jason rasps, unregulated, overstimulated, insomniatic.

Roy draws away and stares at his bedmate.

Jason can’t let hope within his reach go unchallenged. 

So Roy dresses, spite and anger infecting him. He indulges and shoulders Jason in the chest and gets an unkind shove towards the door. 

Roy chews the pain of abandonment on the midnight cab ride home, a familiar meal at least.

The difference between Roy’s death and Jason’s is an incandescent rage; the stout refusal to be anything but betrayed by the ending of his days and by the manner of their ending. Roy’s life was undone, yes, but he wouldn’t change what happened. Jason, though, has never left Hell.

Spatters of rain plink the cab window. Water streaks the streetlights and headlights into vertices and wandering strokes of light Roy blinks into.

Suddenly, Roy realizes that he's okay. Jason's rebuke still stings but Roy is okay, finally. The White world which was once so close and comforting, now waits beyond reach and knowledge. Many of the revealed truths have been taken back to the veil, replaced by everyday cooking, bedtime stories, and the longing to donate his second chance to the good things.

Roy accompanied Jason for a time in those straddling months. Stepping out of the cab in front of his apartment building, Roy submits that time to the rolling mystery of his days.

In the quiet blue night of his kitchen, looking on the sweet crayon drawing pinned to the refrigerator, Roy holds his spirit by the spine.

- 

In the training room, Roy sees Dick reach for the gun.

It’s in Roy’s own palm before the yawning eye of the barrel can pin him. Roy thumbs and squeezes, and with a flick the magazine disengages and skitters across the floor. 

Dick hungers something out of Roy. 

Roy takes a walk to the other side of the training room.

The gun is as familiar in his palm as a glass of water. What it is and can do doesn’t frighten Roy.

The last year of recovery sits heavy on Roy’s tongue. A year that Dick didn’t see, but that Dick wants to erase. Or win.

“I’m in,” Roy agrees. He grasps Dick by the forearm and releases his old friend from expectation, from needing to be understood, for the sake of love and peace. Roy knows what he knows. He might tell Dick some day.

Roy returns to the team, one bewildered human example, willing.