Disclaimer: Young Justice doesn't belong to me. More's the pity.
It wasn't horrible, being in love with your best friend.
That isn't to say it was enjoyable, or fun, but it wasn't horrible. That needed to be said. It was better described as confusing. Con-fusing.
Hmm.
Con-fusing. Fusing plus con. Con sounded like a negative prefix, so fusing must be the opposite of confusing. That made sense. To fuse meant to attach two things; to confuse meant to obscure them, twisting the facts, wrenching them apart.
Confusing was definitely the best word to describe it.
He didn't even know if he actually was in love with his best friend. How do people know if they are in love anyway? When they look at the subject of their affection, does a banner pop up, embosomed with "I love you" in thick, black letters?
That hadn't happened to him.
Nonetheless, it wasn't horrible. His heart didn't wrench every time he saw him, or every time he left, tormented by teenage angst and the unfairness of loving someone who didn't return the favor. That was perhaps, because it was. Oh, he knew that his infatuation was unreturned, but his love? That was never a question. And he was glad of that.
Love- romantic love - hurt. If he had learned anything by watching those older than him, it was that. It was confusing and uncertain and filled with pain and mistrust. It could be bright and filled with beauty, that was true, but never at first. At first it was filled with awkwardness and confusion and pain. And he wasn't ready for that. He was happy with what he had – friendship. Friendship was everything that romantic love was, without the confusion and the hurt and the suffering. It was comfort, profound and warm, and presence, comforting and secure. And he was not willing to shatter that for something he didn't even understand.
Besides; perhaps his love isn't romantic. How would he know, anyway? He's just a kid. He's never had experience with anything like that before. Perhaps his feelings – his confused, ill-defined feelings- are just the result of their friendship getting stronger. That's probably it.
After all, he thinks he'd remember a banner saying "I love you".
A/N: I hope you enjoyed this. If you find any typos are grammatical errors, please let me know. I am preemptively apologize for any blindingly obvious errors I have missed :-) . If you enjoyed this, I encourage you to review.