Author: thecivilunrest
Fandom: DCU
Story Title: "Such a Mournful Sound"
Alternate Titles: "If This Became Canon I Would Cry" "DC This Seems Reasonable" "Fuck You, DC" "Why Can't This Be Real"
Summary: Neither of their roads lead to this place, and yet here they are. /Or, if Donna joined the Outlaws.
Character/Relationship(s): Roy Harper/Donna Troy, Jason Todd, Kori Anders
Rating: T
Warnings: Language, slightly sexual actions.
Story Word Count: 2600+
Disclaimer: Don't make me laugh.
Notes: This was a lot of fun-too much fun, really-to write. Thanks to Annica and Morgan for looking this over for me and catching characterization flaws. Comments are welcome, but never demanded!
I'm always dragging that horse around
All of his questions, such a mournful sound
Tonight I'm gonna bury that horse in the ground
'Cause I like to keep my issues drawn
It's always darkest before the dawn
-Shake It Out, Florence + The Machine
Roy thinks that it's really fucked up that the three of them are so used to dead bodies that they barely react when they see hers on the road.
Death is just a part of them now, a constant companion. The weight of her on Roy's back has lessened some now that he's off the drugs and the alcohol—the things that he thought that if he didn't have he'd die without—but her presence lingers, putting her fingers in business that has nothing to do with her. Jason has been one hundred perfect dead, under the ground and everything, but he beat death with nothing but inhaling dirt and bloody fingernails. And Kori—who even knows what she's seen. She seems so peaceful and beautiful, but Roy knows what her past was like, and it wasn't pretty.
"What do you think?" Roy asks Jason, because he's pretty much the plan guy now. He always knows what to do or has an idea, and that's something that Roy admires. Not that he'd ever tell Jason that, but still. It might have something to do with the fact that once upon a time, Jason was a Robin and worked under Batman, but everyone tended to ignore that part of Jason. Especially Jason.
"It doesn't look like their sort of work," Jason says, getting on his knees and checking the corpse's pulse, just in case. Their refers to some sort of alien, Roy's not too sure of the details. They always seem to be trying to find some alien, going all over the world and meeting lots of interesting people on their way, but still. They never can catch a break. The body in the middle of the road is evidence of that.
"Is that good or bad?" Kori asks, but before Jason can respond the body moves.
It's like something out of a horror movie, something out of Jason Todd's life, when she sits up and opens her eyes. Roy should have realized that she looked too peaceful when he thought she was dead.
.x.
"She's going to stick with us," Jason tells Roy, and he nods. He'd figured that.
Donna—that was her name, Donna—had freaked out once she had realized who they were. Well not really freaked out, but she had stared at them all for a really long time. She looked as if she recognized them, but he was pretty sure that none of them had ever seen her before in their life.
Her gaze lingered on Roy and he didn't know how he felt about that.
But Jason—Jason had looked at her like he almost knew her too. He put up a good front, but he was Roy's best friend. He knew when the Red Hood was freaking, and Jason had been freaking. It was like he hadn't even heard Kori saying that she was going to take Donna to her ship. He'd just nodded.
"What was up with that?" Roy asks, and when Jason just raises a brow he continues, "Earlier. With Donna. It's like she knew all of us... but you were the only one that knew her."
Jason doesn't say anything for a long time. He and Roy can't fly like Donna and Kori, and Roy has yet to see the need of some stupid metal wings, so they're stuck walking. They probably have about a day on foot, less if they can find an abandoned car that Jason can jack.
"You see a lot of freaky shit," Jason finally answers, "when you're dead."
.x.
Roy's never seen Kori's ship before. Red Hood and the Outlaws haven't got much of a break, not since they stopped Roy's execution and all the crap with the aliens went down, so he's never had the chance. But he's heard Kori talk about it, and really it's more beautiful than she gave it credit for.
The beaches are white and when dawn comes up over the water it paints a mural, one full of pink and orange and purple. The mural moves and it just makes a person feel alive. Roy gets why Kori loves it so much here. Anyone, but especially a person from another planet, would love the most beautiful that the earth has to offer.
He thought that he was going to be alone on the beach, but Donna's there and for some reason he feels his heart jump up into his throat. He doesn't know why she affects him like this, but she does, so he's been avoiding her.
But she makes Kori smile like he's never seen her before. When Roy and Jason had gotten there the sounds of Kori and Donna's had been echoing off the walls. And even Jason liked her. He hadn't said as much, but Roy knows.
Donna's wearing something that is obviously Kori's, an itty bitty black bikini, and it's all Roy can do not to stare. This is the least amount of clothes that she's worn the entire time that she's been here, and he can admit now that Donna is gorgeous. Maybe not as aggressively gorgeous as Kori, but she's still beautiful.
"What's up?" Donna asks before she smiles at him.
"Nothing, really," he stares at the water, the colors dancing on the surface, and says, "I hope that we stay here for a while."
"Me too. It's beautiful here."
"I grew up in the house of Oliver Queen, but I've never seen anywhere like this before."
Donna sits up straighter at that, looks at him straight in the eye. "If you grew up with him... then why aren't you with him now? How did you get here, with Jason and Kori?" Even he has to admit that they're a rag tag bunch, seemingly random. None of them have any ties to the other, besides him and Kori and the Titans, but they're still here.
Roy tries to decide what to tell her, what would be appropriate, before he just decides to tell her everything. He has a feeling that she already knows anyway.
"Oh, you know," Roy shrugs. He doesn't look at her. "You start shooting up, get a drug problem, and your friends and family start dropping like flies."
Donna touches his arm. "I'm sorry," she says, and she looks so sincere that he knows that she means it. Most people, when they hear that at one time heroin was the most important thing in his world, feel like maybe he deserved it. They don't say as much, but he can always tell.
"What about Dinah? I can't imagine..." she trails off when she realizes that he's looking at her funny.
"Who?"
"Dinah. You know. Dinah Lance?" When he still looks confused she says, "Black Canary?"
"What about her? I mean, I know of her and that she's kick ass, but..."
"Oh. You don't know Dinah. Oh." Donna sits down on the towel that she brought. "What happened here?"
"What do you mean 'what happened here'?"
Donna smiles again, but it's forced. "Oh, nothing. Never mind."
But she won't look at him, and doesn't speak to him for the rest of the day.
.x.
He gets the idea that he's supposed to know something. That he should understand what she was talking about, but he doesn't. The only person that might have any idea what she might have meant is Jason, but his memories of being dead aren't exactly clear.
He finds her looking over the sunset this time, almost in the exact same spot she had asked him about Black Canary. Donna has seemed troubled—all except when she had been fighting with them. Fighting seems so natural to her. He's never seen anything like her on the battlefield. She's a warrior, through and through, and he wonders what it is that they don't' know about her. What he doesn't know about her.
"Who are you? Where are you from?" He just point blank asks her. None of them have asked her this question, because none of them feel right asking questions. They are the absolute last people that deserve answers from anyone, but he wants them from her. They just found her in the middle of the road, dead but not.
"Do you ever feel like you've lived a thousand lives?" is her answer.
He thinks about his life, the way that he's divided it up into parts because that's the only thing that helps him make sense of it all.
There's the time with his father on the reservation, the time that seems gauzy and behind a veil because it doesn't match up with the rest of him. Then he remembers Oliver Queen making his way into his life, and the Teen Titans. And then there's the time that's punctuated by needles and bruises, hunger and want, a want so bad that it took control of his life and drove him to the point of embracing death. And then there's the aftermath of that, the clinics, the withdrawals, the signs of the addict that wants to get better. And then there's this... his life with Kori and Jason and running all over the globe.
So he answers, "Kinda."
"Well I actually have. In the old world, the world that we came from originally, the world I'm from I was cursed with remembering my past lives. And now... I'm here. And it looks like the world I'm from, smells like it, is identical in every way except... Except the people are different. No one knows anyone like they should, the relationships and friendships are severed. Everyone is younger and it's confusing, so confusing that sometimes my head wants to burst from it."
She pauses and Roy lets the silence fall between them. The implications of what Donna is saying are huge, but he believes her. If people can come back from the dead, then the idea of another world isn't such a stretch.
"But I remember what it's like back there. And it's better. But I don't think there's any going back, not for me."
"I'm sorry."
The apology sits there between them.
"I'll tell you about me, though," Donna says. "I'm not sure if my past from the other world has anything to do with this one, but I'll tell you anyway."
She tells him about warriors, about the Amazons, about how she was adopted by the queen herself. How Wonder Woman was her sister. How her lives were all intertwined and what that meant.
"And then it gets weird, because you... you were always there. For me. With me. In the other world we were together and then not together. This happened a lot, actually. Then you started using drugs and we all fell apart. But Dinah helped you get through it, and you did. You continued to be a hero, even with your past. You never wore stupid trucker hats," she pauses and he laughs. That doesn't mean he's going to stop with the hat, though. He likes it. "You had a child. A beautiful little girl named Lian." She stops again, and brings her fingers to her eyes.
"Me? A dad?" He can't imagine it. He can't imagine holding a child in his arms and having them be his. Not him. He knows better that to think that he should be trusted with something precious.
"Yes. You had her with Jade Nguyen, a terrorist assassin. I don't know if she's in this world or not, but it hardly matters now. And you were the best dad. Lian was a very lucky little girl. She lived with you, see. She couldn't stay with Jade. But then..."
She trails off.
"Then?" Roy prompts. He can't imagine this version of himself, and yet he can. He almost wishes that this had happened in this world too. He wonders if he would have liked the other version of himself more than he likes this one.
"Then... she died. And you... oh Roy, you went," she pauses. "That little girl was the one bright spot in you life and when she died you left us. You went to a place that no one could bring you out of. Not me, not Dick, not Wally. No one. I don't know what happened to you after that, but I heard things and they weren't good. After the funeral it was..."
He doesn't want her to finish that sentence.
"Wow. I must have been quite a character."
"You were. You were funny and a great friend and lonely, sometimes. We fell apart sometimes, you and I, but we always found our way back. I can't help but wonder if that's what's happening again. Us finding our way back to each other, one more time."
.x.
Roy hates clubs. He'll never say as much, but he doesn't like the smell of alcohol, the things that he knows are going on in the dark corners and dim bathrooms. But this was where the snitch had told them that the aliens were located, so they were stuck here.
Kori and Jason went ahead, to confront the leaders. Donna and Roy are supposed to keep an eye on the room, see if they noticed anything out of the ordinary, but keep natural.
It's only fair, Roy guesses. Donna scans the room, but pretends like she isn't, having ordered Roy to get her a martini. She grimaces slightly as she swallows the alcohol but pretends like she didn't.
"If you don't like it then why did you order it?"
"To look natural. Now come on," Donna says as she finishes the rest in two gulps. "Let's dance."
She wraps her arms around his neck and starts moving in ways that he didn't think it was possible for her too. She's wearing a short, black dress that Kori probably owned and there's glitter on her face and arms and in her hair that suddenly shimmer, and she's magnetic. He can't keep his eyes, or his hands, off her.
She looks surprised for a moment when he brings her hips to his, but doesn't move away. His hands slide down to her ass and—that's when the explosion happens. That probably would have been the only thing that could have driven his eyes away from her face.
He realizes that having her body on his is easy. Natural. Familiar.
"Roy, Donna, let's GO," he can hear Jason shouting, and sees one of Kori's blasts, but he just realized something.
He doesn't remember this other world that she told them about. Jason was the only one that came close, but he isn't sure what he knows because he died.
"Wait, Donna." He grabs her arm, which keeps her from following Kori and Jason right away. She glances at him, eyes wide, before looking at the carnage that Kori left behind. "Did you mean it when you said that you thought that maybe this world happened so that we could find our way back to each other?"
She told him this months ago, but he hasn't forgotten. Not for a second.
"I-"
"ROY. DONNA. NOW WOULD BE NICE, THANKS."
And she pulls away from him.
.x.
They're sitting on the beach again. They always end up here, somehow, whenever they come back to calm down at Kori's ship. It's their place in a world where she doesn't belong and he shouldn't really be.
Neither of their roads lead to this place, and yet here they are.
"Did you, though? Mean it?"
It's been at least a month since he asked her that same exact question, but this time she has no reason to pull away.
"Yes. I did. I don't think it's the only reason, but..." she trails off, put one of her hands on the back of his head.
"It's one of them," he says and then kisses her.
Tomorrow they'll get back to work, but today? Today's the day that they come back together.