~Author's Note~
Hey guys. Spitfire is awesome and all but traught holds a special spot in my heart and this fic just happened. Wally is kinda an asshole in this but that's just for the plot and there's also cheating in this which I don't like too much but it just worked out that way. Anyway, I hope everyone enjoys and reviews are always appreciated! :)
Rated Teen for references to mature scenes, a tiny bit of language, sensitive topics, little violence, sexual situations and some serious angst.
Notes: The somewhat vagueness of this story is on purpose. Who is 'he' and 'she'? Are they who you think they are? What are these 'times' I'm referring to? Is it each time they're having sex or each time they're just meeting up with each other? Or both, a mix of the two? And for the sake of this story, Dick's also more mature in this story, to the point where he's slept with a good amount of women.
you're supposed to be his (but instead you're mine)
honestly i can't see why you hide behind
porcelain eyes, a faint disguise to mask, you're nothing special
white lies you keep there set in stone
they turn so dark when we're alone
.
.
.
The first time it happens, she's mad at Wally.
She's so mad she's seeing red, and her hands are shaking. Her thoughts are filled with hate and she'll be the first to admit she really wasn't thinking clearly. Her feet directed her to his house and she doesn't even realize she's there until she's furiously banging on the door. When he pulls it open and she sees him, she doesn't know if she wants to punch him too or scream at the top of her lungs because it's all wrong. She shouldn't be at his house and she shouldn't have had that fight with Wally and the world should still be spinning.
But then he says her name, once, twice, and she just . . . she loses it. She doesn't cry, or yell. She practically staggers into his open arms and then her lips reach his of their own accord and she doesn't want it to end.
The second time it happens, she's thinking clearly.
She's conscious of every action she takes, every move he makes.
She's aware of the couch, of his roaming hands, of the heat. She knows what she's doing, and what he's doing. She knows the mistake she's making and, frankly, doesn't care. She doesn't care what happens next or what could come of it. She just wants him and she knows—oh she knows—he wants her and, by the way he's acting, for a while too. Every time she whispers his name he tugs her closer like he can't get enough and every time he kisses her, she doesn't want him to pull away. Because there feels right. There feels like it's always been right and he's what she's been looking for.
The third time is the worst.
Because by now she can't fool herself anymore—not like she's been fooling herself the last two times anyway. But he reeks of cologne this time. It's from the charity ball he had to attend earlier in the evening, and she knows the cologne goes with the hair gel and crisp suit but it's not him at all.
It's a persona. It's a mirage, a blindfold around the public's eyes to give them something to write about that isn't about Killer Croc escaping from prison again or Scarecrow killing two more people with his experimenting. The sharp smell is so strong it makes her nose scrunch up, her eyes water.
Though when he leaves the room to use the bathroom, she finds her eyes still watering and she's not so sure it's because of the cologne anymore.
The fourth time is explosive.
It's like a match igniting, a fire burning wild. She's mad because Wally's packed all his things away in a corner and has vacated their apartment completely. The dumb dog's gone too, along with all his toys and food. But she doesn't care. She doesn't care. She started this mess, she started the fight, she did this. It's her fault, it's all her fault so she has no right to be mad in the first place.
(She's mad anyway.)
He's pissed because he feels as if he's being pulled in fifty different directions all at once. The guilt of doing this is swallowing him alive, leading the team is strenuous, and to top it all off—some woman tried to grope his ass earlier that day. Which normally he wouldn't mind, he's slept with so many women he's lost count of how many, but this time it's different because he's entwined with something tedious, something risky, in-between his night and day jobs. It feels like betrayal, some woman grabbing his ass, to her in a way. But this thing they're doing, this thing they've done—four times now—it is betrayal.
He doesn't know why it bothers him so much.
The fifth time is hallow.
He's exhausted. He's exhausted from balancing two separate people at the same time—the player, and the leader—and it's taking a toll on his energy. He doesn't know how he balanced it back when he was thirteen, but at the same time he does know. Because when he was thirteen, women weren't down his throat and begging for his attention. The upperclassmen at Gotham Academy didn't even bat an eye when he walked their way because they were rich like him, had the paparazzi like him; his scrawny self was nothing special.
But now, now it was like he was the hottest piece of meat on the market and everyone was placing bids. Everyone wanted him. His shoulders had squared out, and so had his jaw. He got taller and now some people had to look up at him when they talked and not the other way around. His hair grew out a bit, giving him that messy-billionaire-look and his chest got bigger too.
The skinny muscle from when he was a teenager turned thicker, but not by too much, just enough to now be noticeable under a thin shirt, enough to make women swoon up close and personal.
The women always seem to multiply and never seem to leave him alone.
After the sixth time, she finds a full body mirror on the back of his guestroom door and stares at her reflection a little too deeply.
He had to leave because there had been a break in at Wayne Enterprises and he had needed to go, and she had offered to go with but he had brushed her off and said he'd be fine. There was a brief kiss and he tasted sweet, like too much icing on an oven-cooked cinnabon, and then he was gone. All she wants to do is hit the mirror. She wants to punch the mirror until it breaks, until it shatters into a trillion tiny pieces.
The mirror makes her realize that she's different.
That she's not the same girl Wally lifted into his arms and kissed on New Year's Eve.
Her face is stiff now, hardened by her time undercover and her time dead, and there's faint worry lines starting to outline her features. Her hair is long, somewhat in need of a trim, but that's still not the biggest change of it all. Her mind is. It swirls with pasts and presents and futures. It lightly treads the line between happiness and loneliness. Words echo like mantras—hypocrite, liar, bitch, cheater, cheater, cheater—and she tries to block them out but she can't because they're true.
(The truth hurts worse than any word could.)
The seventh time is not like the rest.
They settle on the brown couch in the living room and watch reruns of old nineties shows. He laughs at the poor acting and she eats enough popcorn for the both of them. But it's enough. It's enough to make her not feel guilty because this, this, is why she jeopardized everything in the first place.
She didn't have to worry if the fridge was fully stocked for dinner. She didn't have to fret about if the speed was going to be the end of him one day, if it was going to take him too soon, before she wasn't ready, because in the end it was unknown—how complex the Speed Force was and she was tired of constantly worrying herself sick that he was going to get sucked in. She didn't have to bite her tongue in fear of saying the wrong thing. She didn't have to second-guess.
The list went on and on.
It's enough to make him not feel guilty about betraying his best friend. He doesn't have to worry if she's being taken care of. He doesn't have to stress about not knowing where she is or if she's okay. He doesn't have to hide his feelings anymore.
It's enough.
In the end though, they both feel horrible for doing this but they also both feel this is the happiest they've been in their lives.
The eighth time she finds herself gazing at his hands.
She toys with his fingers. Runs her thumb over a small pink scar on the inside of his left palm. Feels the rough edges of his fingertips from lock picking with his bare hands and rummaging through his utility belt regularly. Kisses the back of his hand and feels him lean over and leaves a kiss in her mane of hair, feels his lopsided grin.
He finds himself always leaving kisses on her knuckles, or tracing shapes into her skin to calm her when she's fidgeting. He doesn't ask her about the nail on her right pinky finger that's missing about half an inch and smiles sadly at the lines of pink that look like scratches all over her right palm.
His hands are calloused from jumping rooftops and firing grapple guns and hers from pulling back arrow quivers and knifes that were always too sharp whenever her father handed them over.
They fit perfectly together anyways.
The ninth time is quiet.
It's quiet enough you could hear a pin drop from a mile away. They're lying on the bed in his bedroom, huddled under the navy blue blanket. Even their breathing is quiet. Wally called a few hours ago. They could tell he was drunk off his ass, and could also hear Roy guffawing in the background.
He called her every crude name he could remember in the voicemail he left on her cell. She couldn't bring herself to stop listening. She can't bring herself to delete it, either.
She's replayed it at least twenty times.
Her thumb just automatically presses it after a while. As the old grandfather clock in the hallway chimes, he reaches across her and grabs her cellphone from the nightstand. By the time he locates the voicemail and deletes it, she's crying into his shoulder.
After the tenth time, the Team finds out.
They don't put it past Wally that he made a few more drunken calls that night and word spread like wildfire. They can't figure out who gets more dirty looks. But she knew the Team was going to find out someday and she fully expected that he and she would get the brunt of it all because yeah, she cheated. Yeah, she did something unfaithful and wrong. She hasn't even come to terms with it herself yet.
The only person who actually understands is Kaldur.
Being undercover with your life hanging in the balance every second of everyday can bring two people close. She finds herself hugging Kaldur after their latest team mission gone wrong.
Impulse has a broken shoulder, Beast Boy's nursing a twisted ankle, and he's got a potentially serious rib injury that gets him rushed to the Watchtower's infirmary as soon as they zeta back. She's dealing with a split lip, a cut above her right eyebrow that's refusing to stop bleeding and a throbbing left arm. But she locates Kaldur among the commotion and when he sees her he rushes to her and gently grabs her by the arms.
His lips are moving as he asks her what happened and if she's okay and how he's sorry he wasn't with them but all his questions fall on deaf ears as she simply wraps her arms around him and hugs him so tightly Kaldur's not sure what to do for a moment.
He understands after a minute, and hugs her back just as tight.
The eleventh time is awkward.
They have to wait a while because of his broken rib that was patched up in surgery a few weeks prior. They're both distracted and clumsy and she accidentally elbows him in the nose. It blooms dark purple and she apologizes so much that he has to, carefully, kiss her to get her to shut up.
They're both preoccupied by other things.
M'gann and Zatanna both put them through hell earlier. They finally had a chance to offer their options on the matter and they did—honestly. She gets up and grabs him a bag of frozen peas from the freezer to use as a mock ice bag. He accepts it with a hushed thank you. The next time he talks he asks her if what they're doing is the right thing.
She doesn't answer.
He holds the peas up to his nose and says nothing else.
The twelfth time happens before they go out patrolling in Blüdhaven together.
They bust three drug deals, five bar fights and are even able to nab some dirty cops. He brings them to the tallest building in Blüdhaven and they find themselves sitting down and their feet dangling over the ledge. He keeps her close, because he knows she's never been a fan of heights or keeping her balance, while she takes an interest in the late night sky.
It's almost as dark as her heart, she thinks bitterly.
There's no stars shining above. It's because of the city's pollution, he had told her, how the whole city is felons and fumes.
As she leans her head against his shoulder, she finds herself asking him why he choose this city out of all the others. Why he choose fumes instead of sunny Keystone City, or peaceful Ivy Town. She watches his face, imagines the bright blue eyes hiding behind his domino mask. He doesn't bother to turn his head when he replies.
He says that Blüdhaven needs a hero too. He says that a lot of heroes are afraid of Blüdhaven because the criminals are nearly as cutthroat as the ones in Gotham and he refuses to be afraid.
She shivers and remembers why his suit is so thick with armor.
The thirteenth time makes her smile.
He makes her smile. Being with him makes her smile. He always reminds her of how he's still Robin on the inside and always will be. She likes that about him. Being around him makes life bearable and actually, dare she say it, enjoyable. And to her, that's the best goddamn feeling in the entire world. She makes him smile too. He smiles at her beauty, and at her maturity. He smiles at her offhand jokes and smart comments.
He smiles. She smiles.
It's like the world is going to collapse if they keep at it.
It just might.
Before the fourteenth time, she understands just how much she needs him and he needs her.
She gets ambushed in an alley on her way home from the zeta beam late one night and she's outnumbered. They knock her bow from her hands, the arrows from her back. They even succeed in ripping the knife she grabs from the hiding spot in the back of her boot from her too. They want nothing from her but blood. They're crooks who just want to beat her up and that they do, her attempts at fighting back are futile at most.
They leave her only when she's struggling to keep her stomach covered with her broken arm and there's a pool of blood gathering underneath her body. One of them kicks her one last time for good measure and then they're gone. She has issues trying to reach the cellphone in her pocket.
She's surprised it's not broken when she's able to get it out.
She knows she has a broken arm and some sprained fingers on her other hand, and one of them cut her stomach open with her discarded knife—the gash hasn't stopped bleeding since—and one of her legs seems twisted in the wrong direction. She's able to call him, thank God for speed-dial, and he stays on the line the entire time he makes his way to her.
By the time he arrives she's fighting to stay awake and when she feels him gently collect her into his arms she clings to him. She can feel him still for a moment and then move, the click of his grapple gun is unmistakable, and then she's flying through the air.
He promises he won't let her fall as they reach one rooftop and then glide onto another. She trusts him completely. They make it to the hospital and he passes her over to doctors. She sees nothing but the black of his suit before she passes out.
The next time she wakes up she's in a hospital bed and he's in his civvies in the plastic seat next to her, holding her hand.
The fifteenth time is slow and gentle because of her recent injuries.
After, he says three words she hasn't heard in a while.
"I think I love you." His breath is warm against her earlobe, hands running up her sides and down again. He kisses her on the lips and her heart soars, like how she soared when she was flying with him through the chilly nighttime air.
"I think I love you too." She whispers, his lips brushing against her neck. He pauses to laugh and it's music to her ears as her hands slide across his bare chest. She finds his lips and knows that in the end everything was worth it for this, for him.
He knew she was worth it from the first time he laid eyes on her.
(He'll never tell, though.)