The structure of this chapter is different: the italicized dialogue are the instructions Nightwing gives Roy and Jade that night in the storage locker, and beneath each are little snippets of them carrying out or reacting to those instructions. No order, though they shouldn't be too vague to distinguish a rough timeline. Just trying something new here, at the tail end of our story. Let me know if it's as effective as I'm hoping it will be.
New Name
"One last job. You'll have to tell us everything."
"Hook, the ice kid, and Black Spider."
"What's the objective?"
"Some drill thing."
Behind the mask, Nightwing gave Roy a look.
"Knock it off, Jade," Roy grunted. He could practically feel her stretching her legs, or cleaning dirt from under her nails, or watching TV. He would never fathom how she could be so casual about everything, all the time - especially when it was her life they were talking about. "You know we need everything you can tell us."
They were in the Cave, in a private conference room, he and Nightwing listening to the midnight phone call from Cheshire. Even thinking about what was to come made his heart pound, and she was giving them a hard time about the details.
The sound of her sigh filled the room. "It's not like they draw a diagram with footnotes or anything. Some kind of special mining drill, from a college in New Mexico. Al Guhl said it can carve sturdy tunnels and pits in record time."
Dick immediately began tapping away on his gauntlet computer. "Good. What time?"
"Day after tomorrow. Three AM. They have to prep the cargo plane."
They heard a low rustle. "I have to go," and the line went dead.
"Roy, you'll have to design the arrow."
He began working on it the next day, not wanting to waste any time. The Shadows could call whenever they wanted, regardless of their usual grace period for assassins between missions. Relying on patterns - especially those of enormous ninja-gangs who profit off the well-placed deaths of others - was how things got dangerous.
It was difficult; it took days to even find the right kind of adhesive. The first was too strong; when he tested it on a rubber dummy, he couldn't pry it off. The second type was too much like putty and wouldn't stick to clothing.
He also had concerns about firing straight at his girlfriend.
"The force of impact could easily shatter her ribs," he told Dick over the phone early one morning as he sat, head in his hands, on the couch, poring over the assorted arrowheads, shafts, and fletchings he had spread out over the coffee table. "Yeah, but I never aim for the heart. If a bone shard gets lodged there, she could bleed out before we can get her into a hospital, let alone leave her lying there long enough for the Shadows to see."
He must've been talking louder than he'd thought, because when he hid the End button and tossed the phone into the corner of the couch, his caught a glimpse in his periphery of Jade standing near the doorway to the bedroom, watching him.
"Not going too well?" she asked, as if they were discussing the weather and not how to keep her alive.
"You could say that." He rubbed his tired eyes.
She came and sat next to him, and in a rare show of affection - she didn't even like their hands touching when they weren't gliding along each other's bodies - leaned her dark head on his shoulder and wrapped her slender arms around his much thicker one. It was probably just because she hadn't truly woken up yet.
But if Roy thought this behavior was out of character, then the words that came out of her mouth soon after were a complete shock.
"I trust you, Red."
"We'll need your blood. A lot of it."
For obvious reasons, they couldn't go to a medical facility for the procedure, and the Cave was still out of the question. So twice in four weeks, Dick arrived at their apartment with a needle, tube, plastic pouch, medical tape, and bactericidal swabs and Jade would lie down on the couch and roll up her sleeve.
"I'm going to take twice the normal donor unit," he warned her. "It won't be harmful, but you'll feel like crap for a while."
She didn't put up a fight, but Roy frowned.
"Hold up. We're already violating donor code by taking twice in less than three months. Why push it?" He glanced worriedly down at Jade on the couch. She was looking up at him with unreadable eyes.
"We need enough to make her wound to look believable," Dick reminded him, and hooked the needle to the tube and the tube to the blood pouch. "And it has to be hers, in case somebody tries to investigate." Without any warning, he pricked the needle expertly into the thin blue protrusion in the crook of her elbow. She didn't even gasp. "But you might want to go get some cookies and juice or something."
When Roy returned to the apartment, toting a plastic shopping bag filled with a box of pink frosted sugar cookies and three cartons of juice, it was to find his old friend and his girlfriend chatting and laughing, Dick sitting on the floor and leaning against the coffee table, Jade still with the needle in her arm, looking only a little pale as her blood dripped into the clear pouch on the armrest. Blood extraction to fake a gory and painful death aside, the scene was... nice.
"Somebody might try to check for a pulse."
"Wow, Dick," Jade mused one afternoon when an unmasked Nightwing came through their door unannounced. He still sported black sunglasses, though; in seven years of knowing him, Roy had never seen his eyes. "When you commit to something, you really don't half-ass it."
The younger hero grinned. When he smiled like that, it really reminded Roy how young he was.
"It's a type of curare, a neurotoxin that will put you into a paralytic state." He twirled the reinforced vial in his long fingers, and Roy could practically feel the wink behind the black glasses. Always the show boy. "The paralysis will slow your heart rate down enough that you'll at least appear to be dying, if the person checking your pulse is doing it right."
Jade eyed it with a strange mixture of suspicion and interest. "Am I going to be brain damaged afterwards?"
"Nah. You should only have it in your system for fifteen, twenty minutes tops before Roy and I swoop in with the antidote. Any lasting cerebral effects don't occur for a few hours after ingestion."
She wrinkled her nose. "I have to drink that?"
Roy, sprawled on the couch, rolled his eyes. "You're going to be shot in the chest, paralyzed, left for dead by your cohorts, and the part you're worried about is downing the poison?"
As the bickering ensued, Dick strolled to the fridge with a strong sense of deja vu and pulled out the leftover papaya juice from last week's blood sucking, and as he poured himself a tall glass of the salmon-colored liquid, he wondered why all his friends were attracted by women they loved to antagonize, and vice versa. He wondered if the fact that they were sisters meant anything.
Probably.
"Since the Shadows know you without the mask, Jade Nguyen will have to die, too."
One day, a few weeks into the plan, Roy found a stiff manila envelope with his name printed on the front on top of his stack of daily newspapers in the mail room.
"Your death certificate came," he announced to Jade, who was just emerging from the bedroom, holding her head with one hand and looking absolutely exhausted. They'd stayed up late into the night, him working on the fake impact arrow - he still couldn't find a tip that would minimize any damage to her rib cage - and her re-watching Alice in Wonderland for the fifth time since her birthday, and when the clock boasted two thirty, she'd tossed his arrow kit into the far corner of the room and torn off his shirt.
Their sex life was really beginning to suffer because of this plan.
She took one look at the opened envelope and turned right back around. "Can't talk about it now. Need more sleep first. See you tonight."
Roy glanced at the certificate in his hand and back to the open door of the bedroom. Cause of death: criminal violence.
Maybe Cheshire would soon meet her bloody end, but he would be damned if it ever came to that for Jade.
"You'll need a new name. I assume you have aliases?"
Jade was tapping away on her cell phone, leaning against the counter. Name shopping, she'd called it, since every phony driver's license, passport, and birth certificate she'd ever used had come from the Shadows themselves.
"How does Tatiana Bazinov sound?" she asked, interrupting the Roy's fervent chopping. He'd had the worst hankering for zucchini all week long.
"What?"
She scrutinized him over the phone, taking in his furrowed brow. "Tatiana Bazinov. After Jade is dead." Again, that ridiculous calm - as if she weren't discussing her own imminent demise. "I could pass for Asian-Russian, right?"
Roy glowered down at the vegetable he was hacking into bite-sized bits, as if it had suggested an Asian-Russian name to replace Jade's.
She waited for him to respond. He didn't.
"What about June Woods?" she thought aloud, and continued scrolling through internet pages on the phone. "Would it be too tacky to name myself 'Persephone' if my sister's name is Artemis?" She made a face. "Forget that. Too long. What about 'Eris?' Still tacky?"
Roy set the knife down on the cutting board with a slam. Jade finally stopped the constant stream of names, but looked almost bored by the interruption when he rounded on her.
"I like your name."
She quirked an eyebrow and she spoke slowly, as if to a child. "I can't disappear without a new name, Red."
"What if just your last name was different?"
Switching to defense mode, she crossed her arms over her chest. "Now you're trying to pick my new identity, too? I'm doing all of this for you, you know. You could be a little less of a control freak - "
"Marry me."
"What?"
They were staring at each other now, neither blinking, both absolutely taken aback. Roy didn't know that was where he'd been going with the last names.
But only a moment after he said it, he felt like this was what he wanted all along. The words felt true, and they immediately blotted out any embarrassment or panic or second thoughts. It seemed like the best - the only - option they'd ever left for themselves, since the night she stayed and every night since.
"Marry me. The Shadows don't know my secret identity. Your new name could be Jade Harper. They would never guess you would fake your own death to get married. It's perfect."
If he was so assured of what they had to do, she looked like she was about to bolt.
"Jade?"
Her dark eyes were wide, mouth gaping ever so slightly, and she stood as if frozen.
He stepped closer, slowly, as if she were a deer and sudden movements would frighten her off. "Jade." He reached out a hand and set it gently on her shoulder, reassured when she didn't flinch away or shrug him off. Cautiously, he let his thumb rest on the bare skin over her collar bone, and felt the rapid pulse flying through her veins.
"Jade."
The seconds ticked by. She wasn't even blinking.
"Jade!" Now her silence was just cruel. It wasn't as if he hadn't bared his heart to her or anything.
She took a shaky breath, eyes still wide as marbles, and just as shiny.
Were those tears?
"Aren't you supposed to be down on your knee or something?"
When the words finally came, Roy couldn't help laughing - even though it wasn't an explicit yes, it also wasn't a no. And when his hand slid from her shoulder up the curve of her neck and around the back of her head, the terror was gone from her eyes, and she was looking up at him with something very near to tenderness as he tipped her head up and bent down so their lips could meet.
He forgot all about the zucchini in the rumbling wave of warmth that washed through him at this kiss. It was all-consuming, the happiness that rolled through him, and he threw himself completely into it, swiping his tongue yearningly against her soft bottom lip, savoring the feeling of her arms wrapping around his neck and kissing him back with the same intensity.
They fell asleep that night - Roy hadn't put on the spandex all day - with ragged breaths and his pinkie tracing slow rings around her fourth finger, unable to quench the excitement that had overflowed from him and into her.
