nicotine haze
She drops a pack of cigarettes onto his lap and goes to sit by her usual perch on the window sill. It's half empty, with a red label winding around it and the surgeon general's warning patched over it in big, black letters: smoking kills. He needs to blink to keep it in focus, setting the tiny print of the LexCorp detail aside and he glances up at Jade and asks, "What's this?"
"A pack of cigarettes," she says breezily, staring out the window like there was something other than his fire escape and the fire escape of the next building over to look at. "Such a smart boy like you, I would've thought you'd figure it out without my help."
"Without the sass, please?" He rubs his eyes and feels a headache coming on. "You're terrible. I need sleep, I need a full meal, I need a shave, I don't need nicotine."
"So demanding," she murmurs with an exaggerated sigh. She tosses him something and his reflexes force him to snatch it right out of the air before he even knows what it is. He looks down and finds a lighter sitting on the palm of his hand and when he looks up again, she's gone and the window is open.
Well, hell. He looks between the pack of cigarettes and the lighter, then at the stack of papers waiting for him to finish reading and sneak back into LexCorp archives before they realize it's missing. He reckons he might have another few hours before he has to get moving and decides it's time for a break anyway so he tentatively slides a cigarette between his lips and lights up.
He takes half a drag and starts coughing, pulling it out of his mouth and drawing in breath after breath of stale city apartment air. He'd never smoked before, never wanted to. His body needed to be in peak physical condition, all the time. He doesn't know what it needs now. It occurs to him, briefly, that perhaps he was engineered to not want to smoke, so that his body would always be perfect, ready to infiltrate the League, and he feels his blood start to boil at his realization. He coughs and gasps his way through the rest of the cigarette and puts it out by dropping it into an empty glass on the table and he sits back, contemplating his victory. He feels Jade there before he sees her, a shadow in shadows, and when he looks up, she's back by the window, and he knows she's been there, watching him smoke his first cigarette, the entire time.
"Feels good to be bad, doesn't it, boy scout?" she asks.
He just shakes his head and goes back to his reading, the small break, however damaging to his lungs, keeping his headache at bay for just a little bit longer.
Jade doesn't stay, she never does, and he lies in bed and stares at the ceiling and doesn't expect to get any sleep but doing nothing for a while until his next excursion feels good. A few minutes later, after he's cracked all his knuckles and bitten all his fingernails off and counted every single crack in the ceiling three times, he reaches over to his bedside table, pushes aside his bow and emergency arrow, and grabs the cigarette pack.
The taste of tobacco is bitter on his tongue. He didn't notice it the first time, when he was focusing on beating it as he beat all his challenges: quickly and without relenting. This time, he breathes it in, watches the smoke come out of his mouth and rise into the air, twisting, turning, vanishing into nothingness. He isn't sure whether he likes it or not yet but it's definitely different, lying in bed doing nothing but still doing something. He wonders why Jade gave him the pack anyway, it isn't as though he doesn't have enough vices as it is. Somewhere along the way, he'd racked up drinking and literally sleeping with the enemy. Maybe she thought one more wouldn't hurt.
After he's snuck the files back into the archives, having gained nothing from reading all that crap but a headache and trouble focusing on far away things, he wanders around the city for a while and decides to light another cigarette. Green Arrow had told him once, a long time ago, that he should do new things three times: once, to get over the fear of doing it; again, to learn how to do it; and then one last time, to see if he actually likes it. And he does. There's something relaxing about it, about the simple act of breathing extra deeply, that calms him and, in between taking his first drag and the last little puff before he puts it out on the sidewalk, he finds his mind a little at peace, the storm inside stilled, at least for the moment.
Jade brings him another pack a few days later, and he accepts it eagerly, lighting two and handing her one that she takes with a quizzical smile tugging at a corner of her lips.
"Don't tell me I've been a bad influence," she says, wagging a finger at him.
He takes a long drag and blows it out, trying to make rings out of the smoke but failing. "Alright, then I won't."
She takes a seat at her usual spot on the windowsill and holds her cigarette away from her, angled down toward the fire escape so she doesn't tip ash on the floor. "And you're enjoying your new vice?"
"It calms me down," he explains.
"I see."
He smokes his cigarette, puts it out on the ashtray he bought the other day, a tangle of red glass that caught his eye when he went on the midweek beer run, and looks up at Jade to find that she has let hers burn into a column of ash.
"You could've just said you didn't want one," he says but she gives him her half smile, the one that she gives him when he knows she's wondering just what the hell she's doing here, and tosses her cigarette out the window.
It's all fun and games until, about four weeks later, he's staking out a physicist that worked at Cadmus several years back and he feels a headache that had been slowly sprouting behind his eye blow out until he can't ignore it anymore. After quickly checking for injuries and finding himself clean, he relaxes from his battle ready stance and moves away from the sniper scope aimed at the man's bedroom window, rubbing his eyes. He realizes, with a start, that he hasn't had a cigarette in two days.
It doesn't come to him as a shock that he's already addicted to nicotine, he has been smoking like a fiend for an entire month. Somehow, he has forgotten why it was exactly that he had never smoked, and that nobody had ever bothered to even remind him not to. He quickly fishes in his pockets, finds a nearly empty pack, and lights one with the smoking end of an incendiary arrow. By the time he takes his last puff, lying on the concrete of the rooftop he's perched on, he feels like his head has been readjusted. He stares down at the pack on the floor like the little rolls of tobacco have betrayed him and considers just tossing them away. But he doesn't. He slips them back into his pocket, goes back to his surveillance, waits another hour before the physicist finally leaves for work, and he sneaks in, paws through everything, and comes away empty handed. But at least his head doesn't feel like it's being cleaved open anymore.
The real wakeup call occurs a whole six weeks later, when his plane touches down on the tarmac and he's never been happier to be back home, where he has a pack of cigarettes sitting dutifully on his bedside table and his head is pounding from three days' withdrawal. He walks briskly through customs and into the terminal, ready to call himself a cab and be done with the entire, fruitless trip, when he spots Jade at the bar directly beside the exit, a baseball cap casting her face in shadow.
"Wow, a welcome committee," he says as he approaches her, taking a seat and putting his hand up for the bartender to notice. "I feel like I should say something. I'd like to thank the Academy—"
"Can it, Harper," she says, rolling her eyes, but she doesn't deny that she's here to greet him, and it almost makes his headache okay. He accepts a kiss, they drink a few vodkas, and she invites him over to her place. He couldn't imagine saying no, even if he wasn't halfway drunk and craving a cigarette the way people crave to breathe.
He doesn't stay (she never does, so why should he?) and finds himself standing on the corner of the street across from her apartment, miles away from his own and he squints to see through the darkness of his shades and the darkness of the night and he feels a buzz in his veins. He's wide awake so he decides, what the hell, he'll walk for a while. He hasn't been getting much exercise anyway and he needs to sober up before he crashes. He's never liked sleeping drunk. The hangover destroys his brain, almost the way his headache is now.
He pauses in his happy walk and checks his pockets for a cigarette and finds none. After a moment of standing in the middle of the street thinking, he remembers that he hadn't packed any on his sudden trip to Hong Kong and that there's a whole pack on his bedside table waiting to be smoked. Okay, he thinks, just make it home and you can smoke the whole thing, Roy. But he looks around after a few more minutes of walking and realizes that he doesn't know where he is.
He checks street signs but nothing is familiar, looks up at the layout of the rooftops but can't focus with this incessant pain behind his eyes. He sighs heavily and checks his wallet, finding a ten dollar bill. Perfect. He can get a whole bucket of cigarettes with that.
He walks along the street, searching for an open store, a gas station, anything, but everything is closed. His watch is still running on Hong Kong time. The position of the moon in the sky indicates that it's well past midnight, although he can't tell how far past. Slowly, the buzz is degraded to an uncomfortable heat. The fun's over. He needs a cigarette, stat.
He walks a little longer, finds bodega on the corner of a dark street under the trains that have stopped running for the night and peers through the glass. It's closed. Another block down and he's met with the same black windows. Two more blocks and he's scratching at the glass, unable to keep still. He's filled with anger, suddenly, and thinks about smashing through the storefront glass, snatching a pack, and getting his head together on a rooftop out of sight. He'd even leave the money at the register. It isn't like anyone will even see him.
He can't believe he's even considering breaking and entering for a goddamned cigarette. What is the world coming to? He used to be a hero, people used to clap for him as he passed by, used to call him for help, and now they're going to call help when they see him, fidgety and nervous, his head aching, jetlagged and exhausted, and he hasn't eaten anything that hasn't come out of a bag in something like a week, and he's been tracking scientists and flying around the world to sneak into labs and catching two hours of sleep a night if he's lucky and he doesn't want to do this anymore.
He slumps down against the storefront glass until he hits the concrete, the cold seeping through his jeans and biting into his borrowed skin. Maybe he'll get frostbite and have to get his ass amputated, and his lungs removed after they find out what he's been doing to them. It'll be something, meeting the real Roy Harper when he's breathing out of an iron lung and walking on crutches to support his ass-less body. What a story that will be.
He feels Jade before he sees her, sliding down to sit beside him, crossing her legs before her at the ankles. For a beat, they sit in silence, the sound of their breathing the only noise in the sleeping city, and he can pretend that even though he isn't even a real human being, the two of them could be the only living things in the whole town.
She hands him a cigarette and lights it for him, then sits back and watches him smoke the entire thing in under a minute.
"This is a terrible habit," he says as he puts it out. "Why did you do this to me?"
"I didn't do anything," she tells him, shrugging innocently.
"You gave me like two packs, what do you mean you didn't do anything?"
She turns all the way to face him, her eyebrows raised. "No, I didn't. You made the choice to smoke them, you knew what they would do. You can do that, you know. Make choices. On your own. Without anyone else interfering. And you can depend on something other than your search for this kid."
He tries to roll his eyes but she commands all his attention, her face close enough to his that he can count her eyelashes, and he realizes that she's right. As usual. But he doesn't have to make it easy for her, and he shows her that by biting her chin.
She pushes him with a force that doesn't match her slim build. "Animal."
"I guess I have to be something, since I'm not really human. An animal sounds good."
She scoffs and stares out onto the street, at the lights glancing off the dark asphalt.
He says in a low voice, "Thank you." His headache is abating into a dull pulse matching his heartbeat, and he thinks he could probably stay the night at her place for once because she might have a stash of cigarettes she never smokes somewhere in the apartment, and he feels a little empowered, okay, like he has some kind of strength over all this. He can choose to ruin his body, subject it to withdrawal or smoke until his lungs become burnt pieces of charcoal, he can do it if he wants to. There is no need, there is nothing required of him, there is no drive that keeps him up in the night like when he wonders where that kid is, whether he's safe, or scared and alone, or dead for years. Just a harmless choice. And it makes him feel like a person.
Jade gives him a smile, a real one that touches her eyes and they're so rare that he has learned to appreciate them when they appear, and gets to her feet, reaching down to yank him up by the sleeves of his shirt. "You're welcome," she says in soft tones, then, in the blink of an eye, she's Cheshire again and she's unbuttoning his shirt right there on the corner of the street by the bodega. "Now let's see if that cigarette worked to get your head straight."
He bites back a smile. "Do I have a choice?"
A laugh dances in her eyes and he forgets his headache, forgets the stuffiness his buzz has degraded into, forgets that he has to be in Geneva in two days, forgets that he isn't the real Roy Harper, and he thinks he'd like to depend on this more than the cigarettes, but by then she's already kissing him and he stops thinking altogether.
.