Chapter Text
Roy jolts awake to a bright spark of pain just under his left eye.
The room is dark. All thick, swirling blackness, except for a small blue light blinking out from the void. It takes Roy a moment to orient, his pulse pounding in his ears and his blood singing for a hit, but after a few deep breaths he manages to remember that he's in his bedroom and hasn’t used in months, which curbs the impulse. Somewhat, anyway. He sighs, pressing his palm to the spark like that will make any difference.
It doesn’t. Won’t. Never will. This is not his pain, after all.
He closes his eyes and tries to imagine what his soulmate is seeing right now. Is that the tip of a knife, pressed just below their lower lashes, visible as a glint of pale metal? Is it the pinch of a mask, oddly placed while suiting up, defined by the digital display of adaptive tech? He hopes it’s not the first, that this is only a momentary discomfort that will come and go without escalating. He hopes, he hopes, he hopes.
It takes a few seconds, but the pain does abate, like an ocean wave washing back out from the shore. He’s not stupid enough to actually think that this will be the last of it, however, so in the reprieve he rolls himself over and fumbles for the blinking blue light, which manifests as his phone screen as he unplugs the cell and raises it to light his way. Thready blue-white light illuminates the mess on the table beside his bed—a scatter of electrical wires and tools and scraps of paper with crayola marker drawings scribbled across them and—
He picks up the singular pill bottle, shakes out two pills, grimaces, and puts one back. He thinks about rolling out of bed for some water but doesn’t manage to scrounge up the energy. The blocker goes down like a lump in his throat as he swallows it dry.
He hates nights like this. Hates them so goddamn much. Knowing his soulmate is out there, in pain, probably crying and sobbing for someone to save them but well aware that no one will because no one has come yet. Roy used to keep himself up all night on nights like this, lost in a heroin haze, watching the marks appear one by one on his skin, hating himself for the fact that he could never find a rhyme or a reason for the torture. Now he just rolls over, letting the blocker take the edge off just enough so he can slip back down into sleep. It will be done by morning, this he knows.
He wakes again some time later, heart hammering and slick sweat cold on his skin. His left cheek is ablaze, so hot he feels it should be lighting the still-dark room, a great swath of hellfire compressed into a single white-hot ember that is being held against his face.
It hurts. Oh, god, it hurts. He knew it would but this is more than he expected, more than he’s ever felt from the other side of the bond, and he barely makes it to the bathroom off the corner of his room, getting to the toilet just in time to start heaving up dinner, hunched over like a gargoyle in the dark. The taste of Ollie’s chili and the medicinal tang of the blocker roll across his tongue, not even fully digested yet. He retches, overtaken by a violent, gut-wrenching shudder. The pain doesn’t cease—it doesn’t change or move, holding steady like someone is pressing a hot coal to the tender skin of his cheek. A hot coal… or a brand.
He breathes through it, or tries. His breath is wet and gasping in his chest, a sucking wound in the shape of no air no air no air. He feels like his lungs are seizing, like he’s choking on his own insides—his whole body prickles with goosebumps, slick skin frigid in comparison to his burning cheek. It’s been seconds, maybe, since the pain began, but it feels like a millennia. He’s not sure how he’s going to survive this, and the urge to take something to numb the pain rises and rises and rises until it’s a cresting wave crashing over him, so deep and overwhelming that he’s drowning in it—
—and then, just when he thinks he can’t take this and he has to find a hit somewhere somehow, he hears a knock on the door, the kind made by a hesitant little hand.
“Daddy?” says a small voice, on the other side of the wood, a thousand miles away.
Roy swallows the impulse to keep retching, to cough up everything inside him whether or not it’s the reason he feels this way. His hands shake as he pushes back from the toilet, wipes his mouth, flushes it. He forces his lungs to expand, taking in air until his head stops swimming quite so badly. The pain is still much too sharp, the pulsating agony indicative of the aftermath of a fresh burn, but he thinks maybe his soulmate no longer has a hot implement pressed directly to their skin.
He takes another breath, letting it out slow through his mouth. “Daddy’s okay,” he says to the door, and the daughter beyond it. “Just sick, sweetheart. Hang on a second and I’ll come tuck you back in.”
“Okay,” she says, her voice a little stronger than before, though still too hesitant for his liking. Roy grits his teeth. She’s been in his care two whole months—he can’t lose his shit right now. He’s just barely gotten her.
It’s the only thought he has, the only thing keeping him moving as he forces himself to stand on shaking legs, leaning hard against the bathroom counter. He flicks on the dimmer switch to low, exposing the old but clean tile in all its yellow-gray glory.
He means to do as he says—wash out his mouth and then carry his kid back to bed, that is—but as soon as he catches sight of his wan face in the mirror, he freezes where he leans.
He thought he was being metaphorical. Using descriptive imagery or whatever. He wasn’t serious about the burning sensation taking the shape of a brand. And yet there it is, an eyesore plain as day as he comes face to face with himself.
It’s jagged, a red-white-blistered wound in the shape of a large, ornamental J, slapped haphazardly across his cheek.
“…Lian? Sweetie?” he manages to croak, staring at what is unmistakably the Joker’s signature, stark across his soulmate’s face and copied over onto his own. “Could you bring daddy his cell phone?”