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For some reason, the handoff always takes place in a parking lot.
The rides are different depending on what direction Grant’s going in. When Roy drives him in the beat up old car that still has a working air conditioning unit by the grace of all that is holy, he plays music. Mostly alternative stuff. Some rock. Grant isn’t sure if he actually likes it too or if being around Roy has just conditioned him to have a tolerance for it. When he’s with him, he rides in the passenger seat, and Lian is usually buckled up in the back.
When Rick or Jesse drive him, it’s in a shiny car in a nice condition. Whichever one of them isn’t driving sits up front, relegating him to the back seat. They tend to listen to the news instead of music, but sometimes Rick will ask him what he’s listening to in his headphones so he can play it over the car’s speakers for him.
All three of them—all four of them, counting Lian—try to engage him in conversation whenever possible. Most of the time he doesn’t feel like talking. The most they really try to get him to open up is when whoever takes him after the switchover asks him what he’s been up to since they last saw him.
Like now.
“Nothing,” Grant says. He fidgets with his sunglasses. He still hasn’t figured out how to stop them from fogging because of the neck gaiter. “We fought some bad guys, I guess."
“Anyone interesting?” Roy asks. “Curb-stomp any nazis?”
Grant half shrugs. “Not really. There was a villain who tried to kill Wildcat, but I don’t remember why.”
“Which one? There’s two now, right?” Roy inches past a stop sign. “Or three?”
“The first one. I think there’s usually three, but I haven’t met the second one. Just Ted and Tom.” Grant shrugs again. “He’s pretty nice.”
“You’ve been making friends?” Roy switches the station and a song by some terrible folk rock band comes on, which of course he knows all the words to. At this point Grant probably does, too. They only play the same six or so songs on these stations.
“Mostly just him and Judomaster,” Grant says. Out of all the people in the Justice Society, old and new, Tom, Maxine, and Sonia are the closest to his age. He doesn’t have much in common with any of them, really, but on the scale from least to most it goes Maxine, Sonia, Tom. And Maxine usually spends more time with Courtney and Jakeem anyway, which just leaves Sonia and Tom. That’s fine. It’s easier to be around only a few people.
“That’s great!” Roy says cheerfully. “You’ll have to introduce me.”
They both know it’s a very slim chance that Grant ever will. It’s not that he really consciously wants to keep Roy and the Justice Society separate. But when he’s around the old guard of the Justice Society, or even the new ones, it doesn’t feel like he belongs. He’s an imposter. The only time he really feels like he belongs there is when he’s with Rick and Jesse and only Rick and Jesse.
He used to feel… maybe not like he fit in perfectly with the team he was with, but at least like he belonged. Like he was supposed to be there. Now it’s like grafting a limb onto a different tree. It just refuses to stick.
It’s not like that with Roy. Roy makes him feel safe. It used to be hard to say that. But now it’s true. Roy makes him feel safe, and he and Lian make him feel like he has a home and somebody he can always go back to even when things get hard. It’s not necessarily that the Titans or whoever make—made—him feel at ease more than the Justice Society does now. It’s just that he has safe people in both places and… And two of them never feel like they’re keeping themselves safe enough.
Grant knows that’s stupid. Silly, really. Rick and Jesse are both more durable than normal people like Roy, and Roy still does superhero work, whether it’s with the Titans or the Justice League or the Outsiders or whatever team it is he’s lending a helping hand to this week. That doesn’t even include the solo stuff he does, or when he goes back to Star City and spends time patrolling old haunts with Green Arrow and Black Canary. Roy’s more likely to die in the line of duty. Alone with no one there to help him the way he’s helped other people—
He doesn’t even realize the world’s gone fuzzy or hear the ringing in his ears until Roy hitting the curb in his rush to pull over shakes the whole car.
“Deep breaths,” he says, and Grant tries. “Good job. Lian misses you. She’s waiting back at the apartment, but I promised her we could go out for ice cream tonight to celebrate you being back. Ollie’s coming by tomorrow to see me on his way through town, but you don’t have to talk to him if you don’t want to.”
When Rick tries to calm him down like this, he never knows what to say, and usually winds up having to get Jesse, who’s pretty okay at it. But with Roy it works differently. Roy doesn’t talk like he’s afraid of what might happen if he gets too upset. Roy talks to him like he talks to Lian after a nightmare, distracting her with mundane plans for even more mundane activities. Grant keeps trying to follow his advice, hanging onto his words and trying to force the anger down. No explosions in the car. No explosions in the car. Breathe.
“You don’t have to introduce me to anyone,” Roy says when Grant has stopped shaking, at least for the most part. That seemed like it had been the thing to set him off. He hasn’t had an attack that bad in awhile—or if he has, it’s been while he was away with the Justice Society. “It’s okay. I’m fine being your side piece.”
Grant wheezes out a wet-sounding laugh. That’s another thing about Roy. He doesn’t think he’s too fragile to make jokes around. People on the Justice Society walk on eggshells around him. Probably because they’re worried he’ll kill all of them if he gets upset.
He doesn’t say much for the rest of the car ride. Just listens along to Roy’s terrible approximation of Nirvana lyrics once they get to a station that actually plays decent music. His chest still burns. Just not as much.
It feels better when they park and go into the apartment building. He can focus on making sure he gets his backpack out of the car. Still, Grant’s pulse spikes when Roy stops him outside the door.
“Do you want to take the mask off once Rose leaves?” He asks.
Grant’s gut clenches.
Roy’s seen him. He didn’t leave.
Jesse’s seen him. She didn’t leave.
Lian hasn’t. He doesn’t want to see the fear on her face.
“Not yet,” he says. Like he did last time. And the time before that. And so on.
“Okay,” Roy says simply, and unlocks the door.
“We’re stopping at the art store on the way back,” Jesse says. She smiles at the road in front of her, eyes very clearly watching him instead of it. “That big one downtown.”
“Okay,” Grant agrees. His stomach still feels uneasy from the brief teleportation journey. At least it’s always easier sitting in the car than it is standing. “Do you want me to come in with you?”
“You can,” Jesse says. “You can help me pick out Rick’s second birthday present.”
“What was his first birthday present?” Grant leans his head against the window. Being with Jesse and knowing that the windows are tinted and there’s always random water bottles and stress balls rolling around on the floor is nice. She always has the air conditioning at the perfect temperature for him to feel cool even with the cloth covering the lower half of his face.
“That’s a surprise for you, too,” Jesse says. Her smile gets a little wider and more conspiratorial.
Grant goes back to looking out the window, watching the city traffic crawl by. When he’d first met Jesse, she’d seemed so… nonstop. Buzzing around like a hummingbird or a bumblebee trapped under a cup even without her speed giving her lightning. Now he knows better. She’s fast, sure, but she’s fast like the roadrunners they saw in Arizona were, or like the black birds with big tails (grackles?) he’d seen around Roy’s childhood home. Fast with a purpose. She doesn’t make him feel rushed or suffocated. There’s always just enough space to breathe. He likes that.
Jesse gets stopped once for an autograph when they go into the store, smiling at everybody they pass. She’s usually relatively happy, at least in Grant’s opinion, but it seems like there’s a new spring in her step today that wasn’t there before. Grant doesn’t think it could be just because he’s back. Something good happened.
“Have you ever tried art?” Jesse asks, inspecting colored pencils. Grant’s not entirely sure what the differences between them are. Maybe it’s easy to tell when you’re not wearing sunglasses.
“Sure,” Grant says, remembering trying to peel dried paint off an empty palette while making eyes at their teaching assistant. “I wasn’t very good at it.”
“Don’t let Rick hear you say that,” Jesse says. She grabs a packet down that looks exactly like all the other ones, turns it over in her hands, and then puts it back before taking the one next to it. “He’ll get on your case about how there’s no such thing as being ‘bad’ at art. It’s just something you do.” She smiles over her shoulder at him. “Of course, he says that whenever I tell him I’m terrible at it, and we both know I can’t even paint an easter egg.”
She pays for the pencils—he gets a better look at the packaging and concedes that these ones must be different because they say they’re for watercolors—and a thick pad of paper. The cashier asks for an autograph, too. Jesse gives her one, and Grant tries not to think about the way the woman’s fake peppy attitude falters when she sees him standing there.
“He’s been looking at these for ages,” Jesse says as they head out of the store. Grant pretends not to see that the fist not holding the bag is clenched. That’s another nice thing about Jesse. She gets pissed on his behalf a lot. Usually she’d be making a scene. He’s a little grateful she’s not. “Now he’s finally going to have time to get back into them.”
Grant eyes her suspiciously as they get back in the car. He’s seen her yell at Impulse or Kid Flash or whatever Bart’s calling himself now. He heard her brag once that even Nightwing called her a corporate shark. That Jesse might as well be worlds away from this one. “What do you keep talking about?”
“You’ll see.” She nudges him and puts the bag on his lap. “I’m giving him his presents tonight after the party.”
“Gross.” It comes out before he can stop it.
She laughs, clearly not at him, and repeats, “You’ll see.”
Grant keeps the bag steady as they go. He’s not exactly excited for the party. He remembers when he would’ve been. Now it just sounds like something he’d ruin by being there. That’s the kind of thought that Lian would be sad he’s having, which usually works to make him stop. At least people he knows will be there…? That’s a good thing. He can stand in the corner with Sonia and Tom. And he likes Rick. Rick deserves to have a party with the people he loves, and whether or not he thinks of himself as deserving, Grant knows Rick loves him.
Maybe it’ll be okay. He might even have fun.
…Yeah, right. Everybody knows superhero birthday parties always get crashed by supervillains. Which means they’ll have to smash them and take them to jail. And Grant hasn’t had fun doing that in…
In a long time, he realizes. It’s been a pretty long time since he actually enjoyed himself stopping criminals.
He used to like it. He knows he used to like it. Getting justice and stopping the bad guys. And even when it hurt, even when he closed his eyes and saw Mandra dead because of him, he’d still been able to keep going. He doesn’t know how he’d ever managed that.
“Who’s coming?” He asks to stop himself from having a crisis any bigger than the ones he’s been having for the past decade.
“Almost everyone,” Jesse says. She drums her fingers on the steering wheel. “I don’t think the future Hourman said he could make it, Nate isn’t coming, and Jakeem has a new curfew.” She thinks for a second and her voice changes a little when she adds, “And Courtney’s taking time off in general, so she won’t be there. But everyone else said they could go.”
He nods. None of that is really a surprise, especially not the part about Nate, although he’s pretty sure he’ll see Jakeem there anyway. He didn’t know Courtney was stepping back from the team, but it’s not like he expected her to tell him. They’re friendly but they’re not really friends. At least he’ll know everybody there. Or at least recognize their names if not their faces.
“You don’t have to go,” Jesse says, guessing why he’s asking. “Rick won’t feel bad about it.”
Grant bristles. “I can go.”
He doesn’t mean for it to come out as hostile as it does. Another unfortunate slip of the tongue. He glares out the window and tries to use all his willpower to not shred the tissue paper sticking out of the gift bag.
“Then you’ll go,” she agrees. “Don’t worry, okay? Everything will be fine.”
This time when Roy asks him if anything interesting happened while he was spending time with the good ol’ J-S-of-A (Roy’s borderline sardonic words, not his), Grant has three answers.
“Villains showed up at Rick’s birthday party. I got to punch an alien. Jesse’s pregnant.”
Roy blinks, taking a second to process that. “Was punching an alien related to the villains at the birthday party?”
“No, this random gang were the ones who showed up. The aliens came a few days later and were trying to capture Hawkman.” Who had not been very thrilled about having to come to the rest of them for help.
“That sounds fun. And you can tell Jesse congrats on the baby.” Roy slams on the breaks when a teenager darts across the road, spilling thankfully cold coffee on Grant’s leg. “Ah, shit—sorry, Grant.”
“It’s okay.” He usually changes clothes when he gets to Roy’s house, anyway. It’s always freezing at the brownstone. You’d think Todd could install some heaters or something, but apparently not. Bulky sweats aren’t the right outfit for Roy’s place.
“You’re in a good mood,” Roy notes.
“I guess.” The party had been… fun, even after the villains showed up like everyone knew they were going to. He’d actually had a full conversation with Maxine, who was mostly just excited to be invited, and true to his assumptions he’d seen Jakeem sneaking around with her help. Al was there, marking the first time Grant’s seen him in ages. He didn’t have to talk to most of the people there, but most of them made an effort to say hi to him, and nobody said anything about the fact that he was one of the only people in costume.
Roy smiles. For a second, it’s like having the old Grant back. He loves him no matter who he’s grown up into—and no matter who he’ll change to become when he’s older—but it’s nice to hear him be happy for once. He deserves it. He’d almost expect him to be… more distressed than before. With Jesse being pregnant. He knows the relationship Jesse and Rick have with Grant is different from his. It’s more like they’re his older siblings, or maybe his aunt and uncle, than anything else. Which he supposes makes a kind of sense with the people who Grant shares DNA with. And it isn’t that he thinks Grant would be emotionally immature or jealous. Just…
Eh. Nevermind. Grant is happy. That’s what really matters. That’s what he likes to see.
“What else did you bring?” Roy asks, gesturing to the large book sticking out of Grant’s bag. Usually he packs pretty light. Whenever they go on camping trips Roy has to all but force him to bring more than one change of clothes.
“Rick gave me one of his old empty sketchbooks,” Grant says. He looks down at his backpack. He’s not sure of the differences between different types of paper, but he’s pretty sure this one is a different texture than the one Rick got as a birthday gift. “He said I don’t have to use it. But that it might… help.”
“That’s a good idea.” Roy reaches over to squeeze his shoulder. “Lian might want you to tear some pages out for her to draw on. I think we’re running out of printer paper."
“She can have as much as she wants.” They both know Lian has the two of them wrapped around her little finger.
After a lull of silence, Roy asks the question that has now become standard. “Do you want to try showing her your face this time?”
Grant shakes his head immediately. No. He wants this to stay the same. This perfect balance he has worked out of. Parking lot meetups and a foot in two worlds and the most perfect little girl in the world to be his friend.
“Not yet,” he says, voice tight. “Maybe next time.”
“No rush.” Roy’s smile turns a little sad. “We’ll be ready whenever you are, and you don’t have to do it a moment sooner.”
“Draw anything yet?” Rick asks, turning around in the passenger seat. Grant frowns at him and he motions for him to pull his headphones off for a second so he can repeat himself. “Draw anything yet?”
“Not really,” Grant says. “Lian drew a lot. Roy and I used it to play Pictionary with her and Nightwing.”
Rick probably doesn’t want to hear about his nice, professional-looking book being used to play a kid’s game, but he looks absolutely delighted at the news as Jesse narrowly avoids running over the curb. “That’s a great idea. We should play Pictionary tonight.”
“I have a meeting,” Jesse says, nudging him, “so you boys will have to enjoy yourselves without me. Maybe you can rope somebody else into it.”
“No problem,” Rick says. He winks at Grant, who wonders if his smile has faded so much as a watt since the night Jesse took him aside and told him the big news. It had almost been blinding when the two of them came to tell him next. (Grant’s not sure if it’s a compliment to him or an insult to Jesse’s mom, who he’s never met, that she told him before she told her.) “Al still owes me a birthday present.”
The two of them start a different conversation and Grant puts his headphones back on. Every time, the transition from the easy comfort of being around Roy to the performance of standing shoulder-to-shoulder with the rest of the Justice Society gets easier. Jesse and Rick… help. They really help.
They make him feel safe. For the first time in a long time, he’s safe with more than just two people who care about him. It’s kind of nice. More than just kind of.
A lot of the time, when he’s with Roy, when he knows he’s safe, his body still acts like it isn’t. There’s a panicked hitch in his chest and a tension in his shoulders that sometimes even hurts and a need to look around the room to make sure there’s no flash of yellow lurking in the corner of his eye ready to strike. (It feels more reasonable when he’s with the Justice Society, because they really are constantly under attack. Like it could actually keep him safe instead of just tricking him into thinking it can.) But lately the feeling has been starting to drain out of him. Like his body and especially his adrenal glands have finally caught up to the situation at hand.
He’s safe with Roy. He’s safe with Rick. He’s safe with Jesse. He’s safe with them because he’s safe from them. Because they don’t want to hurt him. Because they love him in the real way.
He might be okay. For real this time.
In the rear-view mirror, Jesse’s eyes flick over to him.
“He’s smiling again,” she says softly to Rick.
Rick cranes his neck around again. The kid’s still got his face as covered as he can get it. “How can you tell?”
“I just can,” Jesse says. She’s no genius profiler. But she knows Grant always comes back happy from spending time with Roy and Lian and whoever else Roy invites over, and when Grant’s happy and isn’t hunching his shoulders with embarrassment and lifts his chin to look out the window, she knows exactly when he starts to smile. “I think things are starting to look up.”
“What happened?” Roy asks, leaning against the car. He doesn’t sound judgemental. Grant doesn’t know how he’s managing it.
He stares at the ground for a little longer. Frustrated tears prick at his eyes. His sunglasses are fogged almost completely, but he can’t take them off to wipe them clean without them seeing and he knows they already have, all three of them, but he just can’t handle their eyes on him now. He just can’t.
“Do you want me to help you tell him?” Rick asks when the empty air stretches out. Grant can feel his hand hovering awkwardly over his shoulder like he wants to touch him but is afraid of literally setting him off.
Grant’s stomach hurts and his head throbs behind his eyes like he’s going to burst. He doesn’t want to hear what Rick’s going to say about him. How he’s going to dump everything he’s tried to build in the garbage because he’s realized he doesn’t want someone like Grant around him or around Jesse or around the kid they’re going to have. “They saw,” he grits out. “Everybody saw.”
“Your face?” Roy asks. Grant hears him take a step closer. He can picture him perfectly, in the same clothes he was wearing when he dropped him off with Jesse and Rick that morning. The concerned furrow on his forehead. “Grant, nobody on the JSA is going to judge you for—”
“They saw,” Grant snaps. It bubbles up inside him and he tries to take a deep breath and can’t. “I tried to kill Atom Smasher and then my hood came off and everybody saw.”
Now Roy stops, looking over his head for confirmation. “You tried to kill Atom Smasher?” Grant knows Jesse and Rick must nod, because he hears the sharp breath Roy takes through his teeth. “Want to walk me through that one?”
Grant shakes his head, balling his fists in his hair. “No.”
“Something happened a little while ago,” Jesse says quietly. Clinically. Grant wants to scream at her. “I wasn’t there, I don’t know how it got brought up. One of the younger members of the team got hurt, and the person who hurt them pretended to be Al to do it.”
Anger burns hotter in Grant’s chest. Pretended to be him. He knows that’s true, he knows that, because Jesse wouldn’t try to hide something like that away. She wouldn’t make excuses for it. He knows that. He fucking knows that and he knows that the reason they didn’t tell him at first was for privacy to keep one of his teammates safe. He fucking knows. He still wants to blow the fucking brownstone up and take himself with it, and he knows he would’ve if Rick and Jesse hadn’t pulled him off just like they did months ago.
Roy’s voice is full of concern (and Grant knows he’s imagining Lian, bloody and curled under rubble all alone and waiting for her father to save her, and that only makes him feel worse) when he repeats “Hurt?”
“Hurt like Terra,” Grant says, because all he can think about is that day with Deathstroke and the mundane way it’d been brought up, like it was gossip, like it was okay.
Nobody says the rest of it, even though they’re all thinking it, the words hanging in the warm breeze of some random fucking parking lot. Nobody says “like you.” They don’t have to.
“Okay,” Roy says. He doesn’t sound pitying. Another thing he does that Grant can’t fathom. He takes a deep breath. Grant’s a good kid. He knows he would’ve done the exact same thing as him. But it’s different knowing it wasn’t actually Al’s fault. Maybe that’s a fucked up moral code, but it’s Dinah’s, and he trusts her with this kind of thing. “Do you want to come stay with me for a little longer? Lian misses you already.”
“I can’t go back to the JSA,” Grant says hollowly. Al’s blood is under his nails. This is different than the last time they fought. He really wanted to kill him this time. And he doesn’t even feel concerned about it. All he cares about is that they saw him. They saw his face. He can’t go back.
“Maybe you can’t,” Roy says, and pushes right through the sounds Rick and Jesse try to make in response to that. “But we don’t have to decide that right now. We can just go home. Alright?”
“You’ll always have a place with us,” Jesse says. She squeezes Rick’s arm because she can’t squeeze Grant’s. “Even if you don’t want to take it. You always will.”
“You’re one of us, Grant,” Rick says. He sounds so sad, like Grant didn’t almost commit murder in front of him. Like Grant didn’t lash out at him, too. “Always.”
He wants to say “thank you” or “okay” or “I’ll miss you” or something. But he doesn’t. He can’t.
He just gets in Roy’s car and puts his head between his knees and cries while Roy rubs his back and hums under his breath until the shaking stops and the headlights on Jesse and Rick’s car (he knows them so well, he knows Jesse wishes she could run all the way home to clear her head, that she would if she wasn’t concerned about the effect of the speed force on the baby) are long gone.
“He’s killed people before,” Grant says after well over an hour, voice choked and hoarse. “Atom Smasher has.”
“I know,” Roy says, and Grant honestly has no idea if he did know that or not.
“We were going to play a game,” he says in a rush. “Because I played Pictionary with you. And Rick wanted him to play with us, and we were trying to find other people to play because it’s better in a group, and—there—he didn’t know Courtney would be there and—she had to get something, I guess, I don’t know, but she was there when we came around the corner and she looked so—she looked—she was—and I wanted to kill him.”
“But you didn’t,” Roy reminds him. Like that matters.
“I could’ve. I wanted to. I was going to.” He can still feel Al’s fingers scrabbling at his hood, trying to get a grip on something that would let him push him off. He knows he could’ve smacked him aside like a bug if he really wanted to. Grown to be bigger than the building and crushed him. But he didn’t. He tried to push him first, like he didn’t want to hurt him. “And then everybody saw.”
Roy nods. “Did they seem upset? Or scared?”
He hopes the answer is no. He’d like to think that the people he’s worked with before for years wouldn’t do that. Jesse and her husband don’t mind. He can only hope the bare minimum extends to everyone else.
“I don’t know,” Grant admits. “I didn’t look. I just—I kept hitting him. And I didn’t stop until Rick made me stop.”
“Rick had a bruised jaw,” Roy says. Grant hates how calmly he observes it. (An act, one Grant doesn’t recognize. Roy is freaking out. Kids he can deal with, for the most part. Even traumatized ones. Even Grant dealing with a flashback or calling him from home and mumbling a description of a nightmare to him. Knowing he can handle it and actually doing it in the heat of the crisis are different things.)
“I hit him, too,” Grant grits out, like prying a loose tooth free from its socket. His voice cracks. “I hit him and I screamed at him and I told him not to look at me.”
Roy takes a few more deep breaths. “Were you really hitting them? Is that who you saw when you attacked Atom Smasher or when you punched Rick?”
The way Grant wraps his arms around his head is answer enough. Roy never laid eyes on John Emerson. He doesn’t need to. All he has to know is that that is who Grant saw.
“I’m not a therapist,” Roy starts. He runs his hand through his hair. “I’m not… Take all this with a grain of salt, okay? Because I don’t really know what I’m talking about. But I think with the job we do, it’s really easy to see the world as… hit or be hit, I guess. To kind of turn everyone into either—maybe not hero or villain, but split them into someone who needs to be protected and someone who they need the protection from. Someone to hurt because they’ll hurt someone else. Sometimes that’s true. Sometimes people need to be stopped before they cause more pain, one way or another. But I don’t think it’s healthy or good to think that way when you’re someone who’s been hurt. I think that’s something like—like survival mode.”
Grant wants to snap easy for you to say. He knows Roy’s had problems. Of course he has. He knows he lost two fathers and almost lost a third. But he’d never… Nobody had ever…
“I lost my trust in GA for a long time,” Roy says. “I know that’s not the same thing. But when I was hurting, it’s like I saw the world split down the middle. And I—I don’t know if I regret that, because sometimes it kept me alive. I’m not going to tell you to stop going after criminals and villains and whoever else.” He shakes his head. “You’re not just a fist, Grant. I know you know the world isn’t something to hit. You were trying to protect your friend and yourself. That’s good.”
This is starting to get away from him. He can see Grant struggling to follow along. He probably already has a headache.
“When I thought I lost Lian, I wanted to kill everyone in my way,” Roy says even though the recollection makes him shudder. “I wouldn’t have let anything stop me from finding her. It’s okay to feel that kind of… urgency. The anger. I want you to protect yourself. I want you to protect other people. But your father—your foster father isn’t here. When you hit back for someone who can’t, I want you to remember that.”
“That doesn’t make any sense,” Grant mumbles. What does he want him to do? Hit or don’t? Of course he doesn’t want him to hit Rick, but he can’t figure out what else he’s trying to say.
“I know,” Roy says, somewhat defeated. “Just… Forget about Atom Smasher for a second. It’s okay to have pain inside you. Sometimes, while the pain is still fresh, you have to feed it in order to keep yourself alive. But you don’t have to feed the pain anymore, Grant. Zoom or the Reverse Flash or whatever he’s calling himself today wants you to feed it for the rest of your life. You don’t have to.”
“Jesse says that too,” Grant says dully. “But I can’t just get over it. I can’t look in mirrors anymore. I can’t—no girl would ever—nobody would—and I don’t—I’m not me anymore, and I’m not ready for them to see me. I don’t want them to see me.”
“Grant—” Roy tries to start, but he keeps going.
“I knew they were going to see eventually. But I didn’t want it to be now. I wanted to do it, I wanted to be the one to decide. I was supposed to have time to prepare for them to hate me and now I don’t. Now I can’t go back.” He looks up at Roy. “I don’t even feel guilty. I know I should, because he didn’t actually do it. But I don’t. The only thing I can think about is how—how—when they all saw, it made me feel so—”
“Grant,” Roy tries again, more successfully this time, “you don’t have to let anyone make you feel small. You have people who can love you and protect you now. And if they judge you for your scars, that means they weren’t worth keeping around anyway. I know that probably doesn’t make you feel better. But I will always be there to remind you that there are people who love you with your scars because they’re another part of you and we love you.”
“Sure.” Grant swallows. His throat is too tight. “Okay.”
Roy and Jesse and Rick are special. They’re not like everyone else. Roy knew him before. Roy got to know all the horrible, ugly pieces of him that are stuck like shrapnel to his skin. He had to stay when Grant’s face—when he got hurt. Jesse and Rick aren’t like most people. They aren’t like most of their team. They’re holding the two jagged edges of the whole Justice Society together; nobody would try to suggest that they stay away from each other just because half the team (himself included) decided to up and leave. They’re the unifying factor. They’re good. Of course they don’t think any different of him.
He can’t say the same about anyone else.
“Let’s go home,” Roy offers. “I’m sure you’re exhausted. I know I am.”
“Can we go camping again soon? Just the three of us?” Grant asks quietly.
“Sure we can.” Roy ruffles his hair. Grant leans into the touch, and Roy savors it, however brief the moment may be. “Tomorrow we can look at some places nearby, unless you’re up for a serious road trip.”
“Okay.” Grant closes his eyes. “...Thank you.”
Roy knows he doesn’t just mean for saying yes. Thank you for picking him up, thank you for talking to him, thank you for wanting to bring the monster he sees himself as back home. He smiles a little sadly as he starts the car. “Of course. Not even Batman could’ve kept me away.”
“I don’t have to go back, do I?” Grant asks for the seventeenth time, staring out the window.
“Like I said, you don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do,” Roy assures him. “Jesse and Rick just want to check on you, and I know them enough not to give them my home address. They’re not as bad as Bats with the way they swarm, but they’re a pain in the ass—a pain in the butt all the same.”
“You said a bad word,” Lian giggles from the back seat.
“I did,” Roy sighs, shaking his head theatrically. “I guess I’ll have to pay the jar when we get home, huh, pumpkin?”
Most of the time when he stays with them, Grant finds himself having to fork over a lot to the swear jar. Roy always doubles it behind Lian’s back. They take the contents of it to a local animal shelter at the end of the month. It’s one of Lian’s favorite things to do with them. Grant can’t even pretend he doesn’t like it. It always makes him feel a little better.
“You’ll stay, right?” Grant asks. He twists the cords of his sweatshirt in his hands. “While they’re here?”
“Of course.” Roy turns down the street that takes them to their usual parking lot. “If we start to get hungry we’ll get lunch at the burger place across the—huh.”
Usually, the parking lot is empty. Grant isn’t even sure which of the surrounding businesses it’s attached to. It kind of just sits there, floating in space. There isn’t even the customary big-city beat up old car that never moves from its spot while grass grows around it. It’s always just empty until one of them gets there.
One of the two cars that are now occupying space in the lot is Jesse and Rick’s. They’re both waiting outside it, leaning against the car with their fingers intertwined and Jesse’s head against Rick’s shoulder. Rick has a big paper envelope in his hand, but if there’s any writing on the outside of it, Grant can’t read it.
The other car is older, even more so than Roy’s, but it looks like it’s in good condition. Judging by the long red hair and freckled face he can see leaning out the window, it’s probably Ma Hunkel’s. He doesn’t think Maxine has her own car, and if she did, he doesn’t think it’d look like this one.
She’s not the only one in the car, he realizes when Roy parks beside them. Ted’s there, probably because Tommy’s in the back seat, all human except for his deep gold eyes. Sonia is already climbing out. Thom is there even though Grant hardly knows him and has to strain a bit to remember his name. Even Jakeem is there, and Grant doesn’t think he’s spoken more than a few sentences to him.
“There’s… a lot of people here,” Grant says past the anxious lump in his throat. Are they all going to tell him he’s fired from the team? He doesn’t care, he’d rather be fired than have to go in front of the old guard and tell them he has to leave because they all saw what he did and what happened to him. It’s just nerve wracking to have an audience, that’s all.
Roy gets out of the car with him, eyes narrowed suspiciously. Lian unbuckles her car seat and pops the door open to join them (Roy says that child locks are dangerous in their line of work). She holds Grant’s wrist because he won’t unclench his hand.
“Hey, Jesse. What’s with the party?” he asks. Jesse’s the one he knows the most. He likes Rick, and he’s glad he’s trying to get clean, but she’s his friend. She’s good people.
“We all wanted to come see you,” Maxine says to Grant. She tries to get out of the driver’s seat, realizes she’s still buckled in, and says the next words while fumbling to free herself. “Rick said they were going to see you and I wanted to come too and when I told Tommy and Sonia they wanted to and Starman overheard and wanted to come and then I asked Jakeem and he said that Bart had been asking about you but didn’t have your number or know where you were living to come see you himself even though he’s been searching the western seaboard so he’s here too. On his behalf.”
“And me,” Ted says. He shrugs. “Just wanted to see how the kid was doing.” His expression looks more like “Tommy made me come.”
Grant nods, overwhelmed. Roy seems to have the same expression. “Oh. Okay.”
“How are you feeling?” Rick asks, motioning for Grant to come closer to them, which he does with an awkward step that leaves Lian behind. “We missed you.”
Grant looks down. “I’ve been… okay."
Better than okay, for the most part. They went camping. Lian showed him her favorite constellations with Roy’s help. He drew a little in the sketchbook Rick gave him, more than just Pictionary—little pencil sketches of Roy and Lian and things around the apartment. There’s one of Dinah from when she stopped by, supposedly to see Roy but really just to spoil Lian. They’re not any good, but it was kind of fun to do them.
On the other hand, the nightmares have been getting… Not more frequent but more vivid. He doesn’t wake up screaming, but his jaw aches from how he clenches his jaw in his sleep. At least before the dreams couldn’t physically hurt him like that.
“That’s good,” Jesse says. She still looks so sad. “We’re really glad you’re doing alright.”
Grant looks at her. Looks at Rick. “Where’s Al?”
He hopes they know what he’s really asking. It’s not about why he wouldn’t come. If Grant was in his position, he wouldn’t come either. But he has to know what happened.
“He left,” Rick says quietly. He squeezes Jesse’s hand. “Wouldn’t even let us clean him up. We think… Even after everything that happened, and even though as far as we know Black Adam hasn’t moved, he went back to Kahndaq.”
“He got why you did it, though.” Tommy’s voice breaks through. He’s got his arms crossed. “He told Obsidian that when he was leaving.”
Grant hears Lian ask Roy “What did he do?” at a whisper, and his stomach folds in on itself. “You don’t have to lie to make me feel better about it.”
“I’ve known him since we were kids,” Rick says. “We aren’t close anymore. But for all the things he’s done since we grew apart, I still know the kind of person he is. Tommy’s right. He knew why you did it and I think he would’ve done the same thing. That’s part of why he left.”
“That doesn’t make it good,” Grant snaps. He can feel himself getting angry. His throat feels raw like he’s been screaming at Atom Smasher in front of Al Pratt’s house—the man who loved and raised one of them but not the other, who could’ve given him a home, who—who—he shakes his head. His knuckles ache like he’s been clenching them around Al’s throat, seeing red and only able to hear the roar of blood in his ears. And he thinks of Al smiling when he saw him, looking uncomfortable and somehow small in the brownstone while Rick tried to convince him to play with them before they rounded the corner.
(Al nudging him and laughing. Al telling him about Al Pratt. Al being his friend. His brother. Blood from Al’s nose on his fists and how he’d tried to ask what was going on while Grant was on top of him.)
“No,” Jesse says evenly. “It doesn’t. But that doesn’t mean he can’t forgive you, and it doesn’t mean we don’t still love you. You’re one of us, Grant. We meant that when we said it.”
“They saw me.” Grant looks at the cluster around the other car. Maxine still leaning out the window, Tommy and Ted in front of the hood, Jakeem poking his head out of the backseat, Thom on the roof, and Sonia with her head tilted as she leans on the side. “I’m never going to be one of you again.”
There’s more he wants to say. They know, don’t they? Any decent person would try to get justice if they’d thought it’d been Al, or at least he hopes so, but don’t they all know? He never wanted to tell anyone. He told Roy. Lian knows something bad happened when he was a kid. Jesse and Rick know and he hates thinking about why they know and everything that led up to the nightmare that made him wake up in a panic on their couch, all sensation and no concrete details. Those were torn out of him. He never wanted anyone else to know.
“Grant—” Roy, Jesse, and Rick all start in unison, and there’s a dizzying moment where they all pause and look at each other. Rick is the one who decides to continue first.
“We love you,” he says quietly. “Like we’ve said. You’ll always be one of us. You don’t have to come back if you don’t want to. But nobody there is going to judge you. Right, Ted?”
“...Right,” Ted says, after a nudge from Tommy. He shrugs. “We’ve all seen our fair share of shit, kid. I’d be the first to tell you that none of those guys have a right to judge you. You didn’t kill him. You thought you had a good reason. I’ve knocked some sense into people for less.”
Roy wants to say that he’s not so sure encouraging that kind of violence is a good thing, as much as he’s been trying to tell Grant that he didn’t do anything so egregious the Justice Society couldn’t handle it, but Rick continues before he can.
“You don’t have to make up your mind now.” He holds out the envelope. “And if you already have, that’s okay, too. Just remember you’ll always have a home with us.”
Grant doesn’t cry until he’s back in the car, holding the sleeve with the lovingly-painted portrait of himself looking out the window with his headphones on so tightly in his hands he’s worried it’ll wrinkle the paper.
“You aren’t leaving forever, right?” Lian asks. Grant chose to ride in the back seat with her so it’d be easier to say goodbye.
‘Not forever,” he promises. “I’ll always come back. I just… I think I need this. Even if it’s just to make sure I want to quit.”
“Maybe we’ll come visit you,” Roy says, glancing over his shoulder at them while at a stop sign. “Three months is a long time.”
Grant nods. He fidgets with the hem of his sleeves and looks at Lian. She’s fidgeting with the robin stuffed animal Nightwing gave her, the one that makes a bird noise if you squeeze it. “I know,” he says. “But I’ll come back.”
It hadn’t been an easy choice. Part of him wants to flee back to Roy’s apartment and never leave. It whispers that this is a terrible idea that’s only going to end in him hurting someone else and then getting hurt in return. That he’s going to regret it the second Roy leaves him with Jesse and Rick when they drop the friendly act and reveal they’ve always hated him. He wants that part of himself to shut the fuck up. Maybe the rest of the team will hate him, and maybe Rick and Jesse won’t actually want him around, but he has to believe that they like him and don’t just pity him for everything he’s been through.
Bart was right, when he came to visit, presumably after Jakeem told him where he was—moving forward is good. It’s the only way to stay alive. Only he used a lot more shark metaphors that Grant found pretty hard to follow.
Roy parks the car. True to his word, they’re there a little early. Jesse and Rick’s headlights haven’t even turned down the road yet. He turns around fully so he can watch the two of them, and Grant swallows thickly at the reassuring look he gives him.
“Lian?” His voice is quiet. “Can I show you something?”
“Uh huh.” She matches his serious tone, eyes big. Grant assumes she can guess what’s coming next as he unbuckles and shifts so he’s kneeling on the seat facing her.
Carefully, Grant pulls the sunglasses off, squeezing his eyes shut as soon as they’re off his face. He pulls the gaiter down with shaking hands and waits for her reaction. He can hear her moving and unbuckling herself. Is she trying to get away from him? Trying to get out of her car seat so she can run away?
A tiny hand touches his face.
“Does it hurt?” Lian asks.
Grant opens his eyes and sees that she has nothing but concern in hers. “Not on the outside anymore,” he says. It’s true. His mouth still feels tight when he smiles. His eyes feel strange when he blinks. But there’s no pain anymore, at least not where the physical scars are. His voice cracks as he adds, “Only on the inside now.”
“I hope it feels better soon,” Lian says solemnly. “Maybe it will by the time you come back?”
Grant can see Jesse pulling into the lot out of the corner of his eye. He looks at Lian and then to the front seat at Roy. Two pieces of the family he never thought he’d get to have again. Two people he knows he loves who he knows love him. Two of the people he knows would never hurt him.
“I hope so,” he says, and doesn’t bring the sunglasses with him when he gets out of the car.
I hope so.