Work Text:
Sunday, 2:30 a.m.
Bart stared down at his sketch pad. He couldn't sleep and he wanted to draw, but he couldn't decide what. It was like his brain had seized up or something. And, well, maybe it had. Maybe it was protesting the sudden flood of information he'd shoved into it a few hours ago. Maybe he knew too much now, and his brain was liquifying, and it would leak out of his ears. Maybe...not.
He probably just needed a good night's sleep. Every time he had fallen asleep tonight, though, he'd been awake within seconds. He kept having nightmares about guns and scalpels and Jericho making the team hurt each other.
Instead of trying to go back to sleep after the last time, he'd come down to the kitchen for a snack and had brought his sketch pad and a pencil. The blank page seemed to stare at him in the dim light filtering in from the dining room windows. He drummed his fingers against the table and sighed.
"Hey. What are you doing up?"
Bart jerked in surprise and sent his pencil flying across the room. He looked up to see Gar in the doorway, wearing just a pair of soft-looking pajama pants. He looked sleepy and tousled and...really sexy. "Um. Hey." Bart zipped over to the refrigerator to retrieve his pencil and paused to grab a container of leftover fried rice. "Couldn't sleep. You?"
"Same. Kept having weird dreams." Gar got himself a glass of almond milk and sat down across the table from Bart.
"Nightmares?" Bart asked in between bites of rice. He wanted to keep Gar talking because his voice was all husky, and it made Bart feel sort of shivery.
"Partly. Memories, too."
Bart nodded and finished off his rice, then stole a drink of Gar's milk. He tossed the empty container in the sink, threw out the disposable chopsticks, and sat down with his sketch pad again. "So...what kind of stuff do you remember?" he asked quietly. "You don't. Have to answer. I mean, I dream some bad stuff sometimes, and—"
"It's okay," Gar interrupted gently. "Sometimes I dream about the jungles, and my parents. I dream about old fights from when I first joined the Titans." He looked down at his glass, then drained it. "Tonight I dreamt about Joey—Jericho. About him being trapped inside Raven's soul."
"I kept dreaming about blood," Bart murmured. As he spoke, his hand began to move across the page. "I think the surgery was scarier than getting shot. I mean, I got shot, and it was over. But the operation just kept going and going, and I thought maybe I was gonna go crazy. There was so much blood, and little chunks of me on the table, and I couldn't quit thinking about how I screwed up on my very first day with the team."
The lines he'd drawn were starting to look like something. A person.
Gar just nodded like he understood. "You didn't screw up. You were just trying to do what Kory told you to do. I know she wasn't paying attention to what you were doing."
Bart added more lines.
"You didn't screw up, Bart," Gar said again.
"You already said that."
"But you still don't believe it."
Bart started shading. "Wally doesn't believe in me. Nobody does, because I'm—because I was Impulse. Can't be trusted because I can't think, can't restrain myself."
"Bart..."
Gar reached out and laid his hand on Bart's left wrist, but Bart kept drawing. He was almost done. Another line here, a bit of smudging there... On the page before him was Gar, sleepy and tousled and caught in the moonlight.
He flipped the sketch pad closed and slipped his pencil into the spiral binding for safekeeping.
"Would it...would it be weird if I, um, if I maybe asked to sleep in your room tonight?"
"I snore," Gar warned, smiling.
Bart smiled back carefully. "I think I can deal with that."