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“Just a little longer,” Dick urges.
Roy has lost all sensation in the side of his body that Dick has been carting around for the last… however long. He’s stopped being able to feel the dripping of blood down the inside of his suit. The prosthetic arm, with its wires connected to his nervous system, has stopped screaming at him the way it’d done when it’d first been ripped off (he’ll really need to speak with Vic about that on. Even the ever-present, whole-body throbbing of the wound in his side has faded into the background.
But there’s something about Dick’s voice that always gets to him. Roy can do many things, but it seems that disobeying a direct order from his fearless leader is one of the more difficult ones.
He tries to put more effort into dragging the other side of his body to keep up with Dick’s relentless pace.
“How much further?” he asks, spitting out a mouthful of blood as he does so.
If Dick notices, he doesn’t say anything. What would be the point, anyway? They both know there’s nothing they can do until they reach help.
“Just a bit more,” is the response, when it finally arrives, and that’s when Roy knows they’re well and truly screwed.
Maybe they other thing that he’s lost is the sense of fear, or the dread, or even the human instinct to shy away from one’s demise.
“Stop for a second,” he says. He refuses to let Dick cart around a corpse, when he isn’t doing that well either. There’s a jagged gash on Dick’s arm that he’d hastily tied a bandage around, and his throat is smeared with blood where he’d just barely deflected a knife. Roy doesn’t like looking at it and seeing how close he’d been to losing yet another person.
“Roy, we’re so close,” Dick tells him, but this time his voice isn’t demanding—it’s pleading.
“Rob, just for a bit.”
Maybe it’s the nickname that convinces him. Or maybe it’s glancing back and seeing the trail of blood they’ve collectively (though not equally) left.
“Fine.” Dick’s voice is tight. “But just for a second.”
Roy barely registers it. His muscles give out on him like they were just waiting for Dick’s permission, and he would’ve slid down the wall had Dick not been holding him up.
“That’s better,” he says on the tail end of a gasp, trying to sound nonchalant, like they’re just teenagers sitting on the curb, too drunk and happy to move.
“Not for long, okay?” Dick says, anxiety in his voice. His eyes alternate between the bleeding wound and the route they still have left to walk.
Now that Roy’s gotten past the pain of it all, this isn’t actually all that bad. He’s floating in a bit of a haze, and it’s only really when someone—Dick—presses down hard on his side that the fog clears.
Roy doesn’t like to admit it, but he’s been trying not to remember how this feels, because he knows all too well just how easy it is to fall back into it. And the others keep watching him, like they know he will fall off the wagon, and it’s just a matter of time until he does. Some days, he forgets why he’s trying at all.
“Donna and Kory are going to be here any second,” Dick murmurs, just like he’s been promising for the last twenty minutes.
“It’s okay,” Roy responds. He hope his voice isn’t slurring as bad as he thinks it is. Now that he’s sitting down, it’s like all that energy that had been holding him up and propelling him forward has vanished entirely.
“It’s not okay,” Dick snaps, finally. “Why did you do that?”
“Hm?”
“You shoved me out of the way instead of taking that kill shot! I was ready for it—I could’ve dodged! If you’d trusted me, then we wouldn’t even be in this situation! If you’re suicidal, then at least have the decency to do it somewhere else.”
Roy wonders when Dick had lost the bet to be the one to have this conversation with him. “I’m glad you finally got that off your chest,” he says, and puts all his effort into tilting the side of his mouth up in a smirk. It doesn’t come even close, and he knows it. “You were not ready to dodge, and I know that because I know you. So instead of me, it would’ve been you we were hauling around. Don’t go getting lazy on me now, Grayson.
“You’re stronger than me and I’m lighter than you; you would’ve been fine,” Dick says dismissively.
“Yeah, well,” Roy looks away, “I’ve had enough of other people taking blows that were meant for me. I don’t care if you’re upset; least you’re alive to be annoyed.”
They haven’t talked about Lian, but it’s mostly because Roy doesn’t talk about her. He can tell, by the glances the others give each other when a conversation topic is approaching her, the warning looks, the don’t you dare or he might actually go off the rails this time glares passed in front of his as though he doesn’t notice. It doesn’t matter, because most of the time Roy doesn’t linger at social gatherings long after that, anyway. If he attends them at all.
Dick tries, now. “I know it’s been six months,” he murmurs. “And you’ve spent all day avoiding Donna and Garth, who get it. You—I’m not the best person to talk to you; hell, they all wanted me to talk you out of coming on this mission anyway. But I figured… fighting and saving people is how we deal with things. I should’ve—I should’ve listened to them.”
There’s silence. Dick looks at Roy worriedly, presses his hand tighter against Roy’s stomach, breathing a little easier when Roy grunts in pain.
Roy finally shrugs. “It didn’t matter if you’d talked me out of it or not. I think we all knew today was going to end as bloody as I could get it to.”
It’s not the whole truth, but it’s as much as Roy has the energy to verbalise. Dick doesn’t say that it’s not what Lian would’ve wanted. He probably doesn’t know what to say, in the face of the lifetime of painful memories Roy is staring down the barrel of. Instead, and to Roy’s relief, he holds Roy’s gut together as well as he can, and he almost cries in relief when they see Kory lighting up the dim tunnel of the cave system.