Spring, 2012:
A beleaguered, bedraggle, beat-down Atlantean drags himself up through the cellar door of a boarded-up old shanty set three miles off the rocky shore of Maine. He drips water over the warped floorboards as he fumbles to the ratty couch in the corner, using memory and the faint strips of moonlight peeking through the grimy shutters to find his way. He pauses above the upholstery, stripping his ditchwater soaked (from swimming through the flooded passage that serves as the shack's secret entrance) clothes and tossing them to the floor. Exhausted and grumbling vaguely to himself about water pollution and gill infections, he collapses onto the couch.
Far too early the next morning, he awakens to the smell of cooking fish. Sitting up and rubbing the sleep from his eyes, he finds that he's been covered in the soft, worn blanket that he, in his exhaustion, had forgotten hung over the back of the couch. Upon further inspection of himself and his surroundings, he noticed that two spaces had been cleared at the cluttered table, a camp stove had been set up on the bench, fish frying on top of it, and the skylight had been pried open.
Ah.
"Nice to see you made yourself comfortable!" a voice calls up from the cellar. A head of short, spiky red hair crests the stairs, and soon Kaldur finds himself confronted with a familiar (and too often absent, these days) grin.
"Good morning, Roy," Kaldur says softly, wrapping the blanket more securely around his hips as he sits up fully. "My apologies for the intrusion. I had planned to return to Atlantis for the break, but… circumstances found that it was not the appropriate place to seek rest."
"One, you're too damn verbose in the morning and I know for a fact you're just trying to make up for the fact that I snuck in here without you waking up. Two, this is your idea of 'a place to seek rest?' And three, stop being so modest. I've seen it all before. Even if I hadn't come in here this morning to find you pulling a Little Mermaid on my couch, there'd be nothing you've got that I haven't seen, smelt, touched and tasted."
Rolling his eyes, Kaldur knotted the blanket around his hip before standing. Padding over to the stove, he inspects the fish.
"You took the skins off," he bemoans quietly as he flips the two cod in the pan. "But I see you've finally learned how to clean them properly."
"Not everyone likes the taste of burnt fish skin, fish-sticks," Roy retorts, setting down the coffee maker and canister he'd fetched form the cellar with a thunk. He plugs the machine into the portable generator beneath the table and fills the pot with water from the rusted kitchen/bathroom sink/washbin. "So, what brings you to Maine? Don't tell me it's the accommodations."
"Yesterday was… productive, but exhausting. We were given the rest of the week off from missions and training. I had planned to visit the Academy pay my respects to the Queen and King in their time of joy."
"So Mera finally had the kid, huh? What's his name?" asked Roy, sifting a few heaping spoonful's of grounds into the coffee maker.
Satisfied that the fish could be left unattended for a bit, Kaldur set about looking for his clothes. "They've elected to name him Arthur."
"After Orin's alias?"
"After the close friend who's name gave birth to that alias." Kaldur replies primly, wrinkling his brow slightly as he rescues his sodden garments from the sink.
"Okay, so what's stopping you from visiting the kid?" Roy asks, stepping over to help wring Kaldur's clothes dry.
Kaldur's distant expression drops into one of discomfort. "I... would rather not say," he replies, slinging his clothes up to dry on a rafter.
"Garth and Tula getting a little hot and heavy for your tastes?"
Kaldur colors. "Their physical relationship is not the problem."
Roy takes his turn to roll his eyes, reaching over to grab Kaldur by the shoulders. Steering the other man to sit down at the table, Roy flips one of the fish from the pan onto Kaldur's plate, and then settles down to his own spot. "So, what is the problem?"
Kaldur hesitates. "I- I'm unsure if I should-"
"Seriously?" Roy snaps. "Kaldur, I found you unconscious and buck-ass naked on my couch this morning, with your clothes crumpled in a pile and soaking wet. You were too exhausted to pull the fucking blanket over yourself or, worse, wake-up when I covered you with it. You didn't even wake up when I started clattering around with the stove! There's no way that you're this tired from your last mission, so why don't you just tell me what the hell is wrong?"
"Tula has asked Garth to marry her. Garth said yes." Kaldur says deadly, eyes dropping to the table. His hands are folded in his lap, his head bowed. He is the fucking picture of defeat.
Roy manages (heroically, I might add) not to drop his jaw.
Tula and Garth. Engaged. Huh.
"I'm sorry," Roy says softly, his own eyes stuck to the table.
Kaldur lets out a half-hearted chuckle. "No my friend," he says, shaking his head. "It is I who is sorry. A sorry excuse for a friend, for begrudging them their happiness even a little. And-," here he lifts his head, and Roy can see the little crinkles at the corner of his eyes that mean he's trying to make light of something awful. "-and a terrible boyfriend, for being jealous over a girl I let go of more than a year ago."
"Kaldur, you know I-"
"I know you understand. And I thank you for that. But now that I have said it- I really did give up on her returning my feelings long before now."
"But there was always hope, right? Before they decided to get hitched, that is."
Kaldur sighs, but a burden seems to slip off his shoulders. "No, there wasn't ever really hope for us. Tula is glad to lend her magic to the Team when we have need of her, but she will never love the surface the way I do. Or," and here a half smile flits to his lips, small but genuine, "for the reasons I do." At this, Kaldur extends his hands across the table, grasping one of Roy's between them.
Roy chuckles, getting up from his seat. Standing, he pulls Kaldur with him back to the couch. "Well, being as terrible a boyfriend as you are, you should remind me just what it is you love about the surface world anyways."
Smiling fully now, Kaldur happily obliges.
Then, about ten minutes later, their activities are interrupted by the smell of burning fish and wood.
"Roy?"
"Yes?"
"Did you remember to turn the stove off?"
Winter, 2015:
Roy enters the old shanty through the skylight. It's been a while since he last visited here- no leads in the area, and even if there had been-
Kaldur had sorta-ambushed him a few times, in his hideouts. Tried to talk him down, get Roy to come back, let the League help him. He never seemed to get that when it came to anything considered a "personal matter" the League was about as willing to help as Lex Luthor. Strike that- even Luthor's willing to cut a deal for the right bit of information.
He guesses that Kaldur's learned that lesson about the League by now, though.
He hadn't believed it when Dick first told him. Kaldur, go over to the bad guys? Yeah fucking right, what's next? Wally West is going on a vegan diet and Batman switched to pink?
And then…
Roy's been working some shady sides of the spectrum, digging anywhere he can for a lead on Speedy. You hear things, bits of conversation, see a few pictures that look a little too real, a little too convincing.
And then he heard about Posiedonis.
And that's all she wrote. Kaldur's changed over, gone over to the Dark Side, done a heel-face-turn in the name of revenge for Tula's death and the lies that he's been told all his life.
Turned into a completely different fucking person, practically overnight.
So now Roy's here, somewhere he hasn't touched base in two years. And he has no fucking clue why, except to maybe clear his head and drown himself in old memories.
There's no way he's looking for a sign, for some hint Kaldur would have left to tell him the truth. That it's all and act. That it's some undercover mission Batman sent him on. That the man Roy had held as the best person on this whole pitiful, broken fucking planet hadn't shat all over the oaths they made to each other and said planet more than seven years ago.
There's no way in hell that Roy already searched every other hideout he has top to bottom, looking some sign that this is all some big trick. Nu-uh. No, sir.
So Roy walks around the shanty, very carefully not checking the cellar steps for fresh water marks, not eyeing the couch to see if the upholstery's even the littlest bit damp or the pans to see if they've been scrubbed.
He finds himself grinning at the burned spot on the bench by the table, recalling fondly the first night Kaldur and he had spent away from the rest of the world in this shitastic, totally out of the way place.
It isn't until he's flopped down onto the ratty old couch, raising a soft poof of dust, that he sees it. There's a note hidden up in the rafters, the smallest corner of it peeking out at him. He wonders how the hell he missed that coming down from the skylight.
When he manages to retrieve the damn thing he finds it's because someone literally painted the back of the note to look like the wood of the rafters.
There's only one person on this Earth besides Batman who's that incredibly anal about keeping things undercover, and he doesn't think Batman's been snooping around his shitty hide-away (and he's not talking about Nightwing, for fucks sake. Like, twenty people know that guy's supposed secret identity. Low-key Roy's ass).
Flipping over the note, Roy finds the word Odyssey scrawled in careful English. A non-descript –FS finishes off the note.
Odyssey- the long and terrible journey undertaken by one man desperate to reach his homeland and save it from the hands of invaders. –FS: Fish Sticks.
Okay, pretty fucking vague. But.
Roy can work with that.
He falls asleep on the couch the night, note clenched tight in his hand and wrapped in a blanket that smells, if he just believes it hard enough, a little bit like the sea.
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