A/N: There will come a day when I will write a fic that will fully explain the depth of my feelings about the state of Roy and Kaldur's relationship thus far in Invasion.
This will not be that day.
There will also come a day when I write a long, multi-chaptered fic about Roy and Kaldur's battle to overcome their personal demons and enter into a long and healthy relationship with one another after overcoming character-building obstacles, with a ton of humor and a pinch of angst.
This will not be that day.
Rather, I give you a collection of related drabbles that fit somewhat cohesively into something resembling a story.
I sincerely hope that you enjoy.
There are times when Kaldur and Roy are friends.
Jokes are traded in soft voices as they patrol the city together, because, for the both of them, there is nothing better than being a hero, saving people (proving that they deserve to be here, in this world, that they belong. Their midnight hunts have only become more and more frenzied since Roy[?]'s revelation).
A year into their friendship Roy catches on to the first (and least important) or Kaldur's deceptions: his feelings towards seafood. They end up wrestling one another on a rooftop when Kaldur lets slip how much he misses his mother's lobster, and Roy realizes that every instance of Kaldur's outrage over the suggestion of fish for lunch or dinner had merely been part of a very long (and incredibly amusing) ongoing bet between Kaldur and his Atlantean friends.
It was when Roy tackled him over the realization that the Great Lobster Rescue of March 10th had been an elaborate hoax (and that the finger scars he had sustained were for nothing) that they fell off the roof and, ironically, into a dumpster of fish heads.
And when Roy, angry and prideful and trying so desperately to prove himself to the world, set all of that aside to break into Kaldur's apartment three days after Kaldur's visit to Atlantis, citing that Kaldur owed him a bad-movie night.
They ordered take out and sat through terrible old alien-invasion flicks, calling out clichés and chuckling over the terrible fake aliens (and if, that night, Roy happens to drape an arm around Kaldur's shoulder and quietly but firmly reassure him that Kaldur is the most amazing guy he knows, well, no one needs to know that).
There are times when Roy and Kaldur are brothers.
When Roy is being an idiot and needs to be reminded that, yes, even solo-heroes need to sleep, Kaldur is the only one who knows Roy well enough (and who is confident enough in his ability to not get sniped- blackmail is a wonderful thing- to go through with it) to sneak sleeping pills into his post-patrol beer.
And when Kaldur is a little bit too enduring (Roy tends to refer to it as being a pushover, because accusing Kaldur of being self-loathing or self-destructive would be far, far too hypocritical for either of them to take him seriously) of his team's unintentional disregard for their leader's health or safety, Roy occasionally tells Batman (in not so many words, because Roy is self-destructive, not suicidal) to go fuck himself and takes Kaldur on a light mission that might or might not involve more hanging out at the beach and less fighting international crime syndicates.
(and there's certainly no way that Roy got Kaldur drunk after Red Tornado supposedly betrayed the team, and absolutely no way that Kaldur told him about Bialya or the cage of fire or the team's reaction to the mole secret, and there's definitely no way that a drunken Kaldur had to tackle an equally-drunken and very much pissed-off Roy to the ground to keep him from going to 'beat some sense into those brat's fucking asses')
There are times when Roy and Kaldur are comrades.
When there's a mission that's too delicate for the whole team (or when it's something that even Batman's not ready to let the rest of the deal with, like an illegal child slavery ring in Asia or the beginnings of an ethnic genocide in Africa) Roy allows himself to be recruited onto the roster.
And he and Kaldur fight through and keep their cool through the type of horrors men as young as them should never have to see (except that Kaldur joined the military at ten and Roy has never been that young, anyways). Roy's anger is tempered out by Kaldur's cool and unshakeable calm, and Roy's ability to act and perfect timing cancels out Kaldur's tendency to hesitate and take too long to think.
They make the perfect team for sensitive missions. And this is not so much as because of their abilities or skills as much as it is to their mutual ability to put the mission as their top priority, even over one another (and how cold, how cruel, how callous does this make Kaldur feel at times. He thanks the gods that the rest of the team has not had to learn that lesson yet. And yet he knows that it is oh so necessary, because it is too easy and too dangerous to give in to his love for Roy, to risk the lives of thousands for one).
Unlike Robin and Kid Flash, who are friends, certainly, brothers, yes, Red Arrow and Aqualad know how to be partners. They know how to play upon one another's strengths, how to cancel out each other's weaknesses. Except for the initial plan, they rarely speak when engaging the enemy. They know how to work with and around one another, how to flow, smooth and seamless and deadly.
In a fight, Kaldur is constantly aware of where Roy is, what he is doing, even when he cannot see him. It is amazing, considering that they have known each other only a few short years and have been partners for less, how perfectly they fit with one another in battle.
There are times when Roy and Kaldur are lovers
When the mission is over and there was a close call (and even if they can focus on what is at hand the reality of what almost happened always comes crashing down on them at the end, drowning and smothering and inescapable) they debrief as quickly as possible, standing a little further apart than normal and twitching and too desperate to be anywhere near one another until they are alone, wonderfully alone.
And then Roy crushes Kaldur to his chest with those strong (but not so strong as to save him from the bullet that almost lodged into his skull had Kaldur tackled him a nano-second too-late) arms and Kaldur wraps his legs around Roy's hips and Roy buries his face into Kaldur's neck (into the gills that almost killed him, once, because how was he to know that water had been specially acidified just in case of Atlanteans) and they rut and fuck and pant and moan until they're boneless and tired and too exhausted to do anything but hold one another and take a silent stock until they drift off to dreamless sleep.
And there is that awkward moment, when the team realizes that they are sleeping together (possibly because they emerge from Kaldur's room in the cave, late in the morning, and Roy is wearing the wrong pair of pants and Kaldur has on the wrong shirt and it turns out that gills weren't the only thing the turtleneck was hiding).
And then it's not as awkward, because Robin is collecting ten bucks from Artemis and Wally is going on and on about how this just proves his theory that Kaldur is secretly Spock and Roy is Kirk, because Kaldur is logical and Roy is reckless and now they're totally t'hy'la, because they're friends and bros and also fucking, so, yeah, hell yes, wait until his followers hear about this.
And M'gann of course has to go bake cookies to celebrate their relationship and Conner only looks relieved that now he knows what all that groaning and banging going on in Kaldur's room was all about.
And there are times when it's not desperate or angry and fast and hard, and they just go slow and sweet (but not quite gentle, because they are both still teenagers and do not have enough control for gentle, just yet). There are nights out by the ocean and on rooftops (which once proved problematic, because of course Ollie would chase a mugger up onto that exact rooftop out of the thousands in Star City), under the dark stretch of the stars and in the cool freedom of the open air.
There are times when Kaldur hates Roy.
When the other is cold, looking away and refusing to acknowledge Kaldur's friendship, his affection (his love), when the other man (boy, still a boy- A man would never be so petulant, and how Kaldur damns himself for thinking these things) builds up the walls with his silence and his pride-
The ice in the air turns to fire and Kaldur is trapped in the flames by that enemy who is his best friend (except sometimes it seems they are only friends when convenient for the other, and jut that thought brings bitterness enough to his throat to choke him).
Sometimes, when Roy is angry or drunk or high (or all three, because his friend tends to lose control in big ways rather than small ones) the words that spill from his lips freeze any affe ction Kaldur bears him into a dagger that bleeds his heart from the inside-out.
There was a moment, once, when Kaldur almost killed Roy.
When Roy was lying, drugged and strung-out and unapologetic, dirty needles and empty bottle littering the floor, his glazed eyes staring up and through him as he grinned that lazy cheshire-cat grin (that grin Kaldur hated, because it was only a reminder that Roy can never love him, not wholly, not when he was so magnetically attracted to the dark and it's shadows), there was a moment when Kaldur wanted nothing more than to shake him until his neck snapped, to force him to actually look at him-
Kaldur has never hated himself more than when he realized just how badly he had allowed Roy's addiction to poison their friendship.
There comes a time when Kaldur and Roy no longer know one another.
Their friendship had been crumbling for the better part of the past three years. The first year after Roy had discovered the truth had been okay. The rest of the League had been helping in the search for the "real" Roy Harper, and Roy's desire to find his other self had been bearable.
It was only after the rest of the League abandoned the mission that his desire turned into an obsession. He began to sleep less, eat less, was even neglecting his patrol. Kaldur was getting pushed further and further away, and there was nothing he could do. This wasn't like the drugs. There was not path to reason, no rehab, no chance to end the addiction.
Kaldur was helpless to help his friend, and things began to break from there.
The first thing to go, naturally, was the sex. It was the newest part of their bond, and the least honestly important. From there their friendship began to take wear, as did their brotherhood. By the time of Tula's death, they were nothing more than comrades.
After Tula died, Kaldur went into a deep depression. The worst of it was that Roy was not longer there for him. A week before that fated mission Roy has dropped off-radar, leaving instructions not to try and contact him unless it was absolutely necessary. Naturally, Kaldur was unable to recognize his own grief as such a reason.
Kaldur became virtually unresponsive in the few days left in the wake of Tula's death and the revelation of his true father's identity. When Batman approached him to ask that he take deep-cover mission as Black Manta's new apprentice, a chance to infiltrate the Light and put a stop to whatever it was that they had been planning, Kaldur accepted immediately. He left the team without explanation to join his father. The only one outside of Batman who ever knew of the mission was Robin, now Nightwing.
By the time Kaldur even thought of Roy, he was in too deep to risk contacting him.
He was no longer even sure as to why he would bother.
A/N- Just to make it very clear- Yes, this was written with an emphasis on Kaldur's perspective. Yes, that means some of his oh-so-very-screwed-up-and-noble mentality snuck it's way in there while trying to disguise itself as sane.