Chapter Text
“Roy,” Jason breathes, radio held up to his mouth and lips so close they are almost pressed to the receiver.
“I’m running now, you know?” He pauses, lifts his thumb from the button on the receiver and changes lanes to avoid a man in a beat-up, puke green Toyota driving twenty miles under the speed limit.
“Well, I’m on the run,” Jason says. “I’m not sure why yet. It’s just that I woke up one morning and all my things were packed and a man in a suit was sitting on our–my couch with a piece of paper saying you died.” The man in the Toyota flips him off. Jason rolls his eyes and ignores him. “And that–that seems like the kinda shit you should run from, right?” He’s speaking quickly now, reliving that moment of pure fucking fear and dread.
I’m sorry to have to tell you this, but, there was an accident.
Jason knows it’s bullshit even if at the time he’d seized up and shoved the man out of their apartment so he could hyperventilate in peace.
The radio is silent bar the buzzing of static.
“Yeah, that’s what I thought.” Jason sighs. “He said he was from Queen Industries which is weird, isn’t it? Because you just started working there a couple weeks ago and Roy I–”
–
“I’m out in–” Jason frowns. “I better not say. Never know who’s got their radio on.”
Last week he had to ditch his car and pick up a new one. He still doesn’t know how he missed the blue Honda that had been tailing him for god knows how long. It’s starting to get dangerous running like this. With no contingency plans or back-up. Jason is going on nothing but a hunch and desperation.
“I’m out in the middle of nowhere. The desert. Red sand and nothin’ else.” He’s got his gaze fixed outside his window, hasn’t bothered to check the road since he reached the endless expanse of flat land and straight lines. “It’s nothing like home. Couldn’t move two feet without running into someone.”
Jason drags a hand down his face. Tries to keep his eyes from drooping. It’s the middle of the day and he’s not stopping for a rest.
“We were gonna move. I know you never liked Gotham. Being so close to Star City and the family. Families,” he corrects himself, memories of Roy rubbing circles on the thin skin of his wrist and telling him about the time his dad tried to put a broken bottle through his neck coming to mind. “I was thinking down south. You wanted to see the gators.”
There’s a small mountain of takeaway coffee cups, empty cans and magazines on the passenger side floor. He needs to clean up and restock. Jason reaches for one of the National Geographic issues and flips it open to the dog-eared page.
“Been to everywhere in the country but never seen an alligator,” Jason says and clicks the car into cruise control. He props the magazine up on the steering wheel and squints down at the page. “Did you know an alligator can go through two thousand teeth in a lifetime?”
No answer.
“Yeah, it made me rethink heading south too.” Jason tosses the magazine back onto the floor. “I’d do it though. For you.”
He should buy some better sunglasses. The sun is too bright out here and out for too long. Next time he sees a gas station.
“Tune in later for more gator facts, Roy.”
–
“It’s been two months now,” Jason says and his voice is steady even if his hands tremble. He’s still in the desert but it is night now and the stars in the vast, empty, blackness of the sky are making him homesick for a place he’s never been. The cigarette burning to a stub between his thumb and forefinger doesn't help.
“Well, almost.” Jason blows a mouthful of smoke out the window. It’s too cold to have them down but Jason doesn’t want to be the asshole who leaves the ceiling of a ‘borrowed’ car yellow. Not that the owner will get it back. “One month and twenty-eight days. Or, twenty-seven. You left when I was out of town.”
That had stung when Jason realised Roy wasn’t dead. Still stings.
“Two months and I still haven’t been able to do things. Normal things. Things that aren’t chasing after your—your ghost or whatever it is I’m following because I’m not even sure if it’s you anymore, Roy.” Jason takes a breath and a moment to collect himself. He’s getting off track. “Sorry,” he says. “It’s just—I can’t listen to music. Of all things.”
It’s painfully honest. Aside from the crackle of the trucker radio he’s been towing from car to car, Jason’s drives have been silent.
“ Music .” Jason stubs the cigarette out on the half-filled ashtray shoved into the centre console. “It’s not even like we did anything around music. It’s only, you used to listen to it non stop in your workshop and now every time I hear it I feel sick.” He lights up another smoke. If Roy were here he’d say something about how he’s smoking too much lately. Roy isn’t though.
“Not an I’m going to throw up sick either. That’s part of it, sure, but it’s an—an ache. Some part of me that feels like it’s tearing in two.” Jason sighs and drums his fingers against the steering wheel. He hasn’t seen a car in hours.
“It’s making drives fucking excruciating.”
-
“I’m not just running from your death, Roy. Wouldn’t want you to get a big head about it. There’s something else. I can’t tell if it’s worse or not.”
Jason stops at the red light and sips from his bright pink slushee. Hums, thoughtful and considering. “I mean, objectively, it’s way fucking worse.”
Ugh. He can feel a brain freeze happening. He always forgets why he never drinks these horrible, awful monstrosities until it’s too late.
“People lose loved ones all the time. You aren’t even lost in that sense. Just missing.” It's not that losing Roy hadn’t hurt. Doesn’t hurt. “But, this. This thing that is, I don’t even know, following me? Stalking me? Hunting me? No, that’s too dramatic.” He keeps the light, easy-going tone to his voice as he says, “I’m scared of it. I think. Something instinctive that feels like it’s ingrained in my DNA because no matter how many times I go over it in my head I can’t shake it. The fear.”
The light turns green and Jason eases his foot down on the 1994 white Ford laser he’s driving. Car’s older than he is but it has next to no security. He’d gotten the door open with the keys from his last car and the screwdriver sticking out from the ignition hasn’t failed him yet.
“It was, god, it had to have been my first stop. At one of those shitty truck stops with food that always tastes like it’s been sitting in the hot box three hours too long. I’d been driving for,” Jason tallies the hours by tapping his finger against the slushee. “Ten hours. No breaks. On the verge of losing my mind. Almost crashed into the fuckin’ sign.”
Jason laughs. It’d been terrifying. He’d closed his eyes for a moment and opened them when the bumps on the shoulder of the road rattled the car and he was about to plough right through the concrete divider. He has to adjust the pair of sunglasses to keep them from falling. He picked them up along with his drink when he got into civilisation and out of the desert.
“So, this truck stop. The lady behind the counter was real nice. Pointed me in the direction of the showers and gave me a plate of pasta salad for free.”
It had been pretty terrible pasta salad but he isn’t going to let the radio know that.
“I’m eating my pasta salad in one of those tiny booths with vinyl seats that never have enough leg room. Might have something to do with the fact that I’m what—six foot three?” Dick was always going on about his height growing up. How it wasn’t fair that his little brother was quickly dwarfing him. “I digress. Anyway, too small a booth, lukewarm food and fresh from a cold shower.”
Jason has to stop talking for a moment. He sucks another mouthful of frozen drink into his mouth and swallows it. “Okay, all good.” He shudders and tells himself it’s from the chill of the drink.
“I’m eating and this man is just staring at me from the little bar by the doors to the patio. Did I say they had a patio?” He’s stalling. It’d be obvious to anyone listening. If anyone is listening. “This man is maybe half a head shorter than me and built like a fucking twig but he stares at me like he wants to rip my head from my shoulders and suck the marrow from my bones. And I think, wow, someone never taught this asshole about biting off more than you can chew.
“The lady behind the counter walks over and hands him a plate filled with, I don’t even know, eggs I think? He doesn’t even look down at them, doesn’t take his eyes off me, just picks up one up between his fingers and starts eating.” Jason traces patterns in the condensation building up on the paper slushee cup and lets his mind go.
“Eggs are messy too. You have to be careful not to pierce the yolk in the middle or else they dribble down the sides and you lose like half your breakfast. But this man, he doesn’t give a shit. Just pops them in his mouth one after the other with his hands.
“His fingers I almost don’t notice. ‘Cause of the way they’re drenched in egg, but, they’re tipped yellow. The kind of yellow you always told me my fingers were gonna go if I didn’t give up smoking but there was something wrong about them. It was like they weren’t really there. If I was any closer I probably coulda seen bone and capillaries and all the little muscles that keep them working. I’m glad I wasn’t.
“But these eggs, half of them are sliding off his plate and the other half are ending up on his chin instead of in his mouth and he won’t stop looking at me.
“And the lady has gone back behind the counter and I’m still eating my shitty pasta salad even if it’s shitty because I haven’t eaten in a while. Which, yes, you probably have something to say about that, don’t you?” He can hear it, the Jaybird are you still taking care of yourself? Well, no. He isn’t taking care of himself. Not anymore.
The radio is as ever, faithfully silent.
Jason will stop leaving lulls in the conversation for it to fill eventually. He’ll learn.
“Finally, I finish eating and I look at him. Yolk all over his face, these dead eyes that look better suited to paintings than people and this yellow trucker cap squashed on his head. Said ‘thistle’ in white. I look at him and I say, ‘hey, man, do you mind?’
“I guess I shouldn’t have brought attention to the way he was staring ‘cause he got up and he didn’t walk right. Walked like he wasn’t used to walkin’. His knees buckled when he slid out of the chair and his ankles looked like they were grinding against bone but he kept going until he was standing next to the seat across from me in the booth. Then, in this voice that really did homage to his tobacco-stained hands, says, ‘hey, man, do you mind?’ and slides into the seat.” Jason pulls onto the highway. Leaves the safety of the suburbs again.
“I say, ‘yeah, man, I do’ or, I mean to. I don’t say anything to him. He smiles at me but it’s as wrong as his walk. Not used to it either, probably. Too many teeth that are just as translucent and yellow as his fingertips. This guy lifts a hand to get the lady’s attention and says, ‘I want you to be very careful about what you say to me,’ and I think, well, fuck you too, buddy.
“Instead, I just nod and wait for him to do something else like he’s the messiah and I’m one of his disciples. He does, do something else, he says, still smiling, ‘Jason, I want you to turn around and I want you to go home.’ He says, ‘Jason, I want you to forget Roy Harper.’
“Honestly, Roy, you may be doing god knows what god knows where but there’s something about hearing your name that will always bring me back to where I need to be. This man says your name and I snap back into myself and I open my mouth and say, ‘get the fuck away from me.’
“His smile twists and there are more teeth and they look sharp and I was so sure it was just the light but the lady comes over to our table and—and—“
-
“You ever had one of those quadruple bacon cheeseburgers?” Jason asks. He’s just passed a sign for one and he’s starting to get hungry. “I figure, there’re only so many arteries I can clog and I’ve been on the road long enough that most of them are already there.”
He’s been living off fast food and spending more time in drive-throughs than he’s spending sleeping.
“Think I’m starting to get fat.” Jason hopes not. Roy won’t care but he does. He’s never quite lost Bruce’s voice in the back of his head talking about efficiency and how ‘one’s body is a temple’.
“It sounds good though, right?” It sounds terrible but Roy would be salivating over the name alone.
Jason laughs as he recalls something. “Remember when Dick tried to get you to go on a cleanse with him? You lasted a day and then started getting me to sneak you burgers.”
Dick had been pissed too. The cleanse had left him a little too tired to do more than be disappointed, thankfully.
——
“Those nature docos we used to watch,” he says, fumbling with the words to describe the thing that he had seen. “Remember that ant—or was it a wasp?— that could turn other insects into zombies?”
Silence.
Whatever. Roy remembers.
“He reaches for this lady and he gets his hand around the back of her neck and he waits, I’m sure of it, until I’ve seen the look on her face. How slack-jawed she is and how vacant her eyes are. Just from him grabbing her.” Jason’s breath comes out in a shuddery exhale. “Like the wasps. He waits and then he slams her face down on the table between us.”
Jason can still hear the crack of her nose against the hard plastic.
“She doesn’t say anything. Just lets him drag her back up. It was so bad, Roy. So much blood. Like that time when I was a kid, you know? Except, this was just from one hit. The man shows his teeth again and he says, ‘Told you to be careful, Jason.’” Jason mimics the low drawl of the man’s voice.
“I don’t move. I just sit there, staring at the blood dripping into my pasta salad and this poor woman’s face. I should’ve stopped it, I know. Should’ve grabbed that piece of shit by the hair and done the same to him but I couldn’t Roy.
“I got so scared I fucking froze up and this man sees it. He says it again, ‘Forget Roy Harper’. I don’t reply and it’s not good enough. His arm shifts, ripples, prepares to bring the woman’s head down against the table and I know he’s makin' a show of it on purpose. To intimidate me.”
-
“Did we ever say ‘I love you’ to each other?” Jason asks the radio and chews his lip. “I think we did. We must have. We’ve been together for so, so long. Since we were kids.”
He’s driving by another sign, this one for a florist that ships plants out to you. It's got big pink and orange lilies painted on the sign. Same kind of flower Roy got him once.
“We’ve said it. I just can’t remember when right now. It’ll come to me later.”
-
“And, I look up at this man and this woman he’s about to murder or disfigure or worse and I say-”
-
“Third date!” Jason tells the radio, jolting from his lax position. “You wore slacks to the movie theatre, cried during Marley and Me and told me you loved me through the tears.”
Jason had said it back, brushed away Roy’s tears and kissed him. It was messy and gross and both their mouths tasted like salt from the crying.
He can’t believe he almost forgot. Can't help but worry what else he's almost forgetting.
-
“I say, ‘okay’.”