Disclaimer: Not mine. Woe!

A/N: Been on a Teen Titans kick recently, so this one was a no-brainer. Yay for After the Camera Stops Rolling ficlets! Post-Teen Titans continuity and post-Patriot Games in JLU.

Feedback: Yes please!

The Ties That Bind

© Scribbler, August 2007.

'What the heart has once owned and had, it shall never lose.' -- Henry Ward Beecher

It was all very victorious and buddy-buddy, with a lot of backslapping and congratulations all round. Little old ladies cosied up to Vigilante and tended Shining Knight like they were their grandsons, while Star-Spangled Kid and Crimson Avenger licked their wounds and wordlessly comforted each other about how little they'd been able to do at crunch-time.

Speedy sat off to one side inspecting his bow with long fingers. He hadn't spoken to anyone since the fight ended, except to say he was okay and ask where his equipment had landed. Ollie watched him out the corner of his eye as he debriefed to the authorities.

"So that's your old partner." Vigilante sidled up. Jeez, did that guy do anything without slouching? Everything about him seemed lazy and drawled – except his aim. Now the bad guy had been defeated, he'd reverted from hacked off to his usual languid disposition.

Ollie respected a guy who could hit a bull's-eye blindfolded and standing on one leg, though he still preferred arrows to bullets. Though it didn't seem so, it was hard to kill someone with an arrow.

"Sidekick." The reply slipped out without thought. He knew Speedy was out of earshot when he didn't correct the misnomer. "Ex-sidekick."

Vigilante shrugged. "Whatever. Ain't never heard you mention him before, is all. How long since y'all worked together?"

"He was sixteen. We didn't part on amicable terms."

"No! I never would've guessed." It was difficult to smirk through a mask, but he managed.

Now, if a dispute with sixteen-year-old Roy was all that'd come between them, this would be a lot simpler. Funny thing about life was that simplicity was always a big fat fake.

"Man," Vigilante rubbed the back of his neck to get the cricks out, "I'm so tired my butt's draggin' on the ground."

"Is Shining Knight okay?"

He nodded. "Nuthin' some modern medicine can't fix. I reckon we got away mighty lucky with no casualties."

Ollie flinched. He didn't mean to, but the word 'casualties', with Speedy sitting right there, brought back some things he'd rather forget. It was a brief reaction though, and reverting to his normal expression was well practised and easier than probably was healthy. You couldn't live this life without seeing (feeling) things you didn't want to.

Like now, seeing Speedy again and feeling like nearly a year was nowhere near long enough to figure out what to say.

The last time he saw the boy he was … well, more a boy than he was now. He'd filled out, or bulked up – obviously put in more hours in the gym than he used to. Ollie remembered how he used to schedule early morning weightlifting for them both, only to find a snot-nosed, red-haired little brat out on the practise range instead. Speedy hated using the machines, and had grown up lithe and pencil-chested as a result. Seeing him with muscles made him even more difficult to reconcile with the kid Ollie first met.

"There weren't no casualties, were there?" Vigilante asked.

"No, thank God."

"Good. I ain't never seen a bird fly so high that it didn't have to come down sometime."

"Meaning…?"

"It don't pay to get too confident in ourselves. We almost didn't make it through today."

"You were worried?"

"Be a fool not to." Vigilante nodded at where Speedy had risen to his feet. "I think your partner-sidekick's about ready to make tracks."

Ollie focussed on Speedy. Be civil, he told himself. He came through for you in a pinch. "Thanks for answering the call today. It helped, having you on hand for that-"

"Save it." Speedy was terse. "I've got to get back to my own team, but I need a ride. Getting teleported is something I really don't want to repeat if I can help it."

"Reckon I know what you mean, partner." Vigilante flicked back his hat in a perfect parody of a Hollywood cowboy. You could almost believe he was picking up a paycheque for this work. "Never trust a machine that can reassemble your molecules in the wrong order."

"Whatever." Speedy was more than offhand, he was downright rude, addressing both and neither of them at the same time. There was a disaffected air around him, as if he'd examined their world and found it wanting in some fundamental way, rather than dropped in for a thirty second battle before conking out on the hood of a Chevy. "My comm.'s busted. What's a guy got to do to get a ride home around here?"

"You're still based in Steel City?" Ollie asked.

A blank look.

"Right, of course, how dumb of me to even ask."

"Don't start, Green Arrow." He used the name as one might the name of a famous actor, both words blended together like they wouldn't work apart. Out of battle, Speedy was acutely, almost painfully aware of the need to safeguard secret identities. It was the only way he was able to sit in a lonely graveyard unmolested by fans, journalists or supervillains – in that order. "I let go of the sidekick thing, so don't start on me for Steel."

"I don't blame you for staying in your city. Fight for the little guy, that's what I always taught you."

"Sure. That's what you taught me."

Ollie regarded him for a moment. "Okay," he said slowly. "But for the record, I still think it's unhealthy."

"Steel's always been unhealthy. That's why it's known as the East Coast's Cesspit."

"You know what I mean. Staying in the city itself is admirable, and shows a lot of commitment, but you should at least-"

"For the record, I don't care what you think." Speedy's mask narrowed.

Be civil. Remember what it was like to be his age. However, it was easier to summon up the memories than for Ollie to act upon them. "You can't live in a museum forever."

"Since when were you concerned about my mental health? The last I checked, you were too busy with your own thing to bother with me."

Ouch. Okay, so maybe he deserved that. It wouldn't have taken much to check up on his old ward; then, perhaps, he wouldn't have dropped such a clanger by learning what'd happened too late. Maybe he could've made some headway, patched things up about how they'd broken apart when he was sixteen, instead of arriving too late, Speedy already having been hardened by grief and impervious to attempts to open old channels. And perhaps he wouldn't have found it so easy to just keep his distance, not wanting to intrude on Speedy's unhappiness and pain (or just plain deal with what might be expected of him because of it) until it was too late, and it'd erected a wall of resentment between them.

They could slip effortlessly back into the old routine in a fight, working together to take down an enemy three times their size with minimal exchanges about what to do next, but put them in an actual conversation…

"Don't be infantile-"

Speedy snorted.

"–You know I regret not getting in touch sooner. I didn't know about -"

"Save it. You have your ghosts and I have mine, so just back off." These last two words were said with such vehemence that he could've been a hormonal teenager again, slamming his bedroom door and listening to rock music that demonised adults for not understanding the pain of the pubescent.

Vigilante raised his hands and almost stepped between them like a referee. "Whoa there. I'm sensin' some hostility here, so I'll just cut right in. We don't want no punches thrown after the fight's finished."

Speedy folded his arms. "So am I walking back to Steel City, or what?"

"I'll arrange transport for you," Ollie said. "My comm. still works," he added, knowing how the kid would feel about accepting help from him personally. Trust him to raise a punk with pride the size of Manhattan – and the ability to hold a grudge until doomsday.

Speedy grunted and went to sit back on his pile of rubble, exuding such surliness that not even eager bystanders approached him.

Ollie radioed in the need for transport.

"Well somebody's got a loose shoe." Vigilante cut his eyes between Speedy and Ollie. "Is the story behind that altercation up for public consumption?"

Ollie sighed. Why not? With a little digging anybody could find out on their own. "Do you remember the Teen Titans?"

"Sure I do. Flash used to be one of 'em, right?"

"Speedy was, too. When he left -" Hm. Perhaps not best to phrase it that way. It made him sound like some spurned lover. "When we stopped working together, that's where he went. There were a lot of Titans teams at one point, scattered around the country – Titans East, West, North, South, Red, Yellow, Blue, yadda, yadda, yadda. Almost all of them disbanded eventually, but Titans East held on."

"An' that was Speedy's team?"

Ollie nodded.

"What happened to 'em?" Past tense. Vigilante was probably filling in some blanks on his own already.

"Oh, they're still around, though he's the only one left from the original roster. I never would've believed it could happen, but he's their leader now, after they," he didn't hesitate, "lost their old one. He and she were involved. He's never forgiven himself for not being able to save her. The last time I spoke to his teammates, they said he still sleeps in their old bed and keeps their room like some sort of museum exhibit."

"Hm." Vigilante looked thoughtful, obviously comparing this information to what had passed between Speedy and Ollie just now. "When did it happen?"

"During the Thanagarian invasion."

A dark cloud passed over the other man's features. He didn't have many good memories of that time, either – but at least he was alive and whole enough to function normally. "Did they do it?" Just the slightest brusqueness entered his voice, a glimmer around the edges, like gilt.

"Yes."

"Hm. An' he takes it out on you?"

"There's a lot of things he takes out on me." Ollie paused. Like how Ollie couldn't save the other 'lost' Titans who'd become Speedy's family in lieu of the man who raised him – or couldn't take their place in death or in life.

Speedy never called when his best friend was murdered by a violently anti-human faction of Altaneans who saw him as a traitor, or when the youngest members of his team lost their powers and had to retire at the ripe old age of eleven. He never called after he was kidnapped and tortured for three days by Cheshire, or when he got engaged (planning a wedding day he never reached). Ollie had to find out through Chinese whispers, months and years after it happened, and had taken ill at being cut out of Speedy's life so thoroughly. If Speedy didn't think him important enough to call about that, he'd huffed, then he could take a running jump about everything else, too.

Then came the Thanagarians, and everything pretty much went to hell in a hand-basket.

Him and his pride.

Ollie shook his head, which ached from being bounced off the asphalt so much. "I didn't know he was part of the League until today. It's kind of surprising, really, that he'd join an organisation where he might accidentally run into me."

"Maybe," Vigilante drawled, "that was the point."

Maybe Ollie would've thought about that more, if he were able. But he'd always been terrible at anything remotely resembling relationships – when he wasn't trying to redesign them to fit his shape, he was screwing them up and sweeping the debris under the carpet. The Bat Clan had competition.

The look Speedy levelled at him made him turn away and go to inspect the damage done to a nearby building.

Ollie'd spent less time trying to understand the world, and his place in it, than he thought he should've. Perhaps then he wouldn't be watching what was once the only person who mattered to him walk away to an empty apartment in a tower shaped like a T.

Or perhaps he wouldn't.

He resolved to book a table at the Ritz and call Black Canary when she got back from her mission.

Fin.