1. This is stupid.

2. He smells nice.

3. I mean it, Dinah. Goddamn. This is the worst thing you've ever done to me, including that time with the dress and your club's freaky auction. Wondy's Lian's godmother now.

4. I hate you, Dinah. If you ever steal this list and read it, consider your rose garden torched. A thousand flaming arrows of righteous fury will descend upon your precious babies, and none shall be spared.

5. He is a secret troll whose favorite hobby is to convince the entire Justice League that he's offended by the practice of eating seafood. Seriously, he's an evil motherfucker when he wants to be.

6. He doesn't treat me Roy like a kid.

7. I'm an adult, damn it, and this "write a list in third person to better understand your feelings from an objective view-point" isbat-shit crazy. Harley Quinn levels of bat-shit crazy.

8. Why am I letting this hell woman make me do this?

9. Kaldur doesn't use "do it for Lian" as his go-to reason/guilt trip for making Roy do stupid, inane things. Like writing lists. About feelings.

10. Because Kaldur puts up with Roy's crap.

11. Damn it, Wally, stay the fuck away from my list.

12. Roy loves Kaldur because Kaldur honestly doesn't mind that Roy's default is grumpy, but he also doesn't find it, well, adorable the way Chesh does. To Kaldur, my Roy's crappy-ass attitude is just part of who Roy is. And there's never really been anyone else who ever actually gave a shit about him who's been able to just accept that. So Kaldur's kind of fuckin' special.

13. Kaldur just wants Roy to be Roy. No one else has ever wanted that.

14. There wasn't a fuckin' moment that Kaldur ever let Roy believe he didn't think of him as the real Speedy- the real Roy. He didn't just reassure him. Hell, everyone did that, even Artemis, and that girl's cold sometimes. No, Kaldur gets it got it just kept treating Roy the exact same, even when everyone else (even Wally and Superboy, the tactless wonders) was walking on eggshells around him.

15. He sings. In the shower, when he thinks no one's listening, when he thinks I've fallen asleep on him during movie night, that one time I got him drunk enough to convince him to sing karaoke (surprisingly enough he did not know any songs from the Little Mermaid. That bullshit was fixed later the next afternoon after our hangovers had gone away. On a totally unrelated note, there are some pairs of panties hanging on the wall in proud tribute to "I Get a Kick Out of You" as sung by an Atlantean under the influence of too much vodka).

16. He makes noises. Little, deep noises that set Roy's spine on fire and make it impossible to do anything else but try to climb inside Kaldur and goddamn that sounds freaky when I put it on paper, what the hell is wrong with me and make him make more.

17. There is no one else Roy would want as back-up in a fight, not even Superman or goddamn Batman.

18. Kaldur is a hilarious, snarky son of a bitch. Roy has nicknamed him AquaSass.

19. Kaldur is Roy's AquaSass.

20. In retrospect, that sounds freaky and possessive. To clarify- Kaldur only lets some people see Kaldur. Kal only lets people he respects see his normal side, you know, the side that isn't a soldier. He only lets people he trusts see his doubts, about himself and everything else. He only lets the people he loves see how fucking sad he is sometimes. The list of people who qualify for all three is pretty damn short, but it's still a list. But...

There's only two people Kaldur let's see the really bad stuff- me and his own mother. I'm the only one beside's Momma Aqua who sees all of the resentment, the heartbreak, the anger he's got stored up inside. And though Momma Aqua gets to see Kaldur at his worst, Kaldur's still careful around her. He never lets her feel it.

But he lets me have it, all of it. Every fucked-up, angry, broken, perfectly human bit of him that he can't afford to let the rest of the world see? I get. Because we aren't so different. We get each other. Everyone else- they don't understand why we let this thing, saving the world, destroy us. Some do, but most of the guy's our age? They don't understand. It's not because it's fun or it's right or because we want to be heroes.

It's because neither of us have ever felt like we belong here. Like we deserve any of this. So we try to earn it, day by day. Protect the people and the places that make it worth breathing. We're both fucking idiots with this unexplainable self-doubt and inadequacy and fuck, Kaldur trusted me to be there.

I broke that. And that's why I hate this list. It's not just stupid (mainly because it was supposed to be written in third person, and seriously Dinah, what the actual fuck?). It hurts.

Because I don't know if I can say I love him.

I'm just not sure I have the right anymore.

Because that list went down to one the day Tula died and Kaldur got the bomb of his lifetime dropped on him. He couldn't trust the man he used to call father, his king, not even his mom. He couldn't talk to Garth at all because the jerkass was blaming Kaldur for Tula's death.

I was all that was left. And then I wasn't there. It doesn't matter why, it just matters that I just fucking wasn't.

I haven't heard from him in weeks. No one has.

There's not a list anymore.

Notes: Old fic, re-posting here from A03.