And you know I don't mean to hurt you
Who: Donna and Roy.
What: Some serious birthday talk. Long and schmoopy.
Where: The lobby.
When: The evening after Roy's grumpy day.
Roy stamps his feet at the start of the lobby by total habit, scrape scrape, even though there's still going to be mud in his footprints when he tracks glumly across. He's in his red leathers but there hasn't been a fight - unless you count his internal struggle to not take Oliver Queen by the shoulders and shake him until he made sense.
"Welcome back, Harper." Donna's voice courses with warmth, but holds an underlying current of caution. It was slightly condescending to think of Roy as something cute and harmless, like a puppy. Nevertheless, it constantly came to mind when she thought of the "right" approaches to handling him (petting him, holding him, playing with him, what have you). She didn't want him to think she was playing an avoidance game at all, but in fact, it was hard to face him. So long did she go without even hope of seeing him here, and now here he was -- turns out he might have been here even longer than she had. Much longer. The thought unsettled her, but was strangely mystifying, as if maybe they had felt loneliness or thought of each other at the same moments.
She was kind of waiting there for him, periodically checking up on the lobby from a spot on the staircase, or from the kitchen. That wasn't pathetic, right?
She smiles at him, glancing down at his boots. "Oh, sure, take advantage of the Ghosts and their willingness to clean up whatever mess you make." She rolls her eyes. "You're such a man."
Somehow, just the sound of that voice makes some of his day better, lightens up the bits that don't really matter and puts a little dollop of balm on the open sores that do. It shows in the way he straightens his neck, sets his shoulders with a snort. How did it take him this long to come back to her?
"Hey, a little dirt never hurt anybody," he informs the lady on the staircase, and casually stops to lean on a chairback while he kicks off his shoes. "And some of us even like it." It's childish to flick a speck of mud at her even from this distance - and so he does it, because he's been the adult for two badly wrenched children all afternoon and he's taking some big-dumb-kid time in the backlash.
Accordingly the next move is to flop into that chair assfirst. It's really not used to that kind of abuse, but who cares? The ghosts can fix it.
She flinched slightly as the mud was flicked in her general direction --well, okay, what the hell? Only an archer could somehow make the speck hit right beneath her eye. Not that she had spent quite an amount of time fixing up today, except she had. Wiping at the mud with her knuckle, delicately, she managed a fond glare -- a categorical rarity that was reserved only for this particular redhead, and made her way closer. Fighting the urge to make some inappropriate comment about him needing a bath, she folded her arms and stared down at him, assessing his condition with a mixture of worry and relief.
"So I take it you had yourself a ton of fun, hm?"
"A blast." What's supposed to start as a dry grin is barely even recognizable as a threadbare smile by the time it makes its way up to her. The eye contact - her sincerity and care - crumbles him completely, and he shuts his eyes with a twisted grimace.
"No," he admits, dropping his head and caving in. "No, it's been a pretty shitty day, start to finish." His shoulders shake, a reflexive attempt to laugh it off. "What about you, have a good birthday?" Maybe they can still change the subject.
Or maybe not. She knew he was a master at deflecting, and usually, she let him have his way. His nonchalance about the general crappiness of his luck at this place unsettled her, though, and she very slowly walked around his chair, standing behind him. "The day's not finished, you know..." She offered a smile he couldn't see, her fingers curling against the nape of his neck lightly before dragging down to grip at his shoulders. "My birthday has been pretty nice. Of course," she trailed, breaking into a soft massage. "A cake's not a cake without a nice red cherry on top! Annnnd now I have you, here, so my wish came true. Guess you don't want to talk about what's bothering you?"
He hissed lightly, let his eyes fall shut at the pressure against the knots in his shoulders. Aah, god, that felt good. "Is this where I say -- nn. Harder. -- say something inappropriate -- about your little red cherry?"
If he didn't already look so exhausted, she might have found it needed to give him a light slap across the head. "I can think of a lot of other things that are red," she chirped in a falsely sweet tone. "Blood, finger marks on a face ..." Her own hands didn't have the cruelty in them, at the moment, to muster up a tight and painful Amazon grip at the knots in his shoulders. Instead, she kept up the careful kneading, enjoying that she was making him feel good. In fact, it felt nice to think that she might be the highlight of his crappy day.
"But enough about that." She drawled, complying and massaging harder. Yes, yes, Roy. We know you most likely destroyed any chance that white was appropriate on her wedding. "I missed you. You don't have any other plans for the evening, right?"
Now that was enough to pull a laugh out of the man, short and real. Nothing like being threatened by a beautiful woman to - ooh. - to pick up his mood. "Are you kidding? At this rate I'm not leaving this spot for another month."
For a handful of time longer, he just let her improve his day. But he had a weight on his mind a little bigger than backrubs and banter, much as he wished he could play it off. Besides, it would get tangled up with them all. He could just feel it.
There was another soft sigh. "Babe." He opened his eyes, fixed on a corner of the coffee table. "The name 'Reno Browne' mean anything to you?"
"Reno Browne?" She looked up thoughtfully, trying to rack her brain. In finality, she shook her head and made a small "Uh-uh" sound, running a hand through the man's hair -- a habit she couldn't ever really drop, she felt, even if they were to become mortal enemies one day. "Sorry, but ... I'm still relatively 'new' to this place, or at least, compared to some veterans here. Perhaps you'd have better luck asking them?"
She almost interrupted herself to add on that she did know A Reno at this place, but it obviously wasn't the person that he was talking about, when she gave it a second thought. "Was this someone ... you met?"
"Someone I knew." he confirmed, taking a moment to tilt into the pet like a lazy dog. "Pretty sure I knew. Rin and Raine Sage recognized the name." When he'd blurted it out in his first few seconds of consciousness. Like so many times over the last week, he tried one more time to reach back into the memory before that hazy awakening. Shadowed faces, echoed voices, a rhythmic thudding beat... and nothing.
He gave an annoyed tch, and leveled a look at the coffee table that could strip paint. "She sure thought she knew me when she dropped me a line this morning." His shoulders were tensing up again, coiling under Donna's familiar hands. "Wanted to know why I hadn't gotten my ass back out there yet. With them."
Whoever 'them' turned out to be.
His words elicited both a protective and almost possessive instinct in her, while simultaneously arousing a curiosity and sadness about just what in the hell he was doing out there in the first place. She was threatened, though, that whoever this girl was, she was still able to contact Roy. And maybe even wanted to in the future. Through excellent muscle control, however, she didn't let on any of this inner turmoil -- at least, not through the massage, which stayed firm and responsive to every slight movement or sound her former lover and teammate made.
"I've been trying to ... not ask too many questions about all of that." Donna's voice was careful and quiet. "But whoever this ... Reno girl is, she should know that you don't belong to anyone." She had to keep herself from snapping, through her tone had gotten a bit more brisk. "Well, anyone but the Titans. Us. Me. You know."
Roy allowed a decent span of silence to follow that. It wasn't an awful thing, to belong again, to be claimed. In fact it kind of felt nice, a home away from home. And damn near impossible, here, now, with the girl who'd been close to his heart since he was in freckles and feathercap, to seriously think about leaving.
'Can't risk any of them following,' his red-leathered ass.
"It's just as well." he finally said, slowly reaching up to curl a rough hand around Donna's wrist. "I don't have that many answers." He found her hand, tugged it close to lay his stubbled cheek in her palm. He lowered his eyelids near-shut. "But she gave me one more."
She was silenced at that, almost sedate for a moment. Her eyes stared guiltily at her own hand, before ruminating on his words. There was a recall of when those in the Castle began finding the village to be their "home." She then thought of that woman that Kyle became attached to --jealousy no longer arising in her, but instead, a curiosity laced with sadness. She always forgot that these people were individuals, somehow, even if they seemed to be different from the Castle residents. But what was Roy, then? Was he one of "us" or "them"? Where did he feel more comfortable? And why wouldn't he talk more about all of this?
"So she was your friend...?" She struggled to keep an accusing tone out of her voice. "Do you feel like you're letting her down? 'Them'?" Whoever the hell 'them' was. Donna didn't trust "them."
Roy sighed, breath gusting across her fingertips. "I don't know." he admitted, almost in defeat. "I remember her face, what she looked like, the way her voice had this husk... but I don't know who she is or who they are. And I don't... I can't put back together... who I was to them." He shook his head, slowly. Faces swirled around his mind when he grasped after them... nothing concrete.
"What I do know is..." and here his voice firmed, took back some of the customary stubbornness. "Anybody who tries to get me to leave you all without a word or a prayer is no friend of mine." He got his scowl on. "I don't care if I'd been running with them five years or five decades."
She pulled her hand away, not sharply, but the motion was quick enough to get a message across. A message, she thought, that might be misconstrued and correlated with his talk of Reno. It was more about the intimacy of his touch. She was intimate with a lot of her friends -- often kissing and hugging and caressing them at any moment she could. But with Roy, it obviously was different. It felt ... less innocent? Donna felt guilty, but there were lines to be drawn, of which were pressing in importance. Roy needed comfort, she knew that. But where he came from, he could take her kind of comfort in the wrong way, and she'd already played with his feelings, in a sense, before. There wouldn't be any of that again, and she had to make things clear, as ill-timed as they were what with his apparent trauma.
The Amazon used that very same hand she pulled away to pat his shoulder, giving him a sympathetic smile. And a relieved one. That last part? She liked. Not the five years part -- what in the hell? "You know that I can understand that," she sighed, in reference to his seemingly-amnesiatic episode. "It's frustrating, because it's going to nag at you, and you're going to search for something that you might not even want ... just so you can put those pieces together."
There was slight caution in her tone now, and maybe a bit of worry. "I wouldn't ... blame you if you wanted to find out more, though."
For a second there Roy's hand just hovered in the air, bereft. What did he do? Yeah, there was a message there, but... he'd been so stuck on his own mental gaps that he was just left flatfooted. After a moment's hesitation, he cautiously settled his hand back over hers, light, almost asking permission. The rules were always different with Donna. Every time.
He nodded, jaw still set. "A half-decade's a long time." he said heavily, a little distant. He'd barely had that much time with Lian-- which thought led him to shut his eyes, and fast. Not thinking about that right now. "I'll find what I can."
She closed her eyes, allowing his hand over hers. They had to find a balance, she knew that -- to express the closeness of their friendship, over a decade of knowing each other, really ... and it being something they'd both be happy and comfortable with. Donna spent too much time in her life being ambivalent, confused, and indecisive. Roy, Terry, and Kyle -- she felt that she didn't do right by any of those men, really, when she was with them. With Roy, they danced in a strange space between sharing parts of themselves with one another that no one else got to see, and between never achieving a true, unfettered and full closeness, without guards and walls up. With Terry, she had let go, and fallen completely in love. In the end, she let him down, always bringing nothing but danger and instability into their life. With Kyle, she felt as if she used him as an emotional punching bag when she was with him at times, and pushed him too hard when he wasn't ready. And then there was the way she broke it off and hurt him. Everyone dreamed of having second chances in life, and she was getting hers with Kyle. She wanted to keep building trust with him, and that meant being more honest to herself and with others.
And if she was honest with herself? The five years thing kept bothering her more than she liked to admit. She had only been at Paradisa for about eight months, and that she was experiencing the luxury of the Castle while Roy was "out there", with only the Gods knowing what happened to him, it unsettled her. She felt guilty for probing him with questions, but she was curious, and felt like she could relate on a very deep level.
"You hungry at all, Robin Hood?"
What: Some serious birthday talk. Long and schmoopy.
Where: The lobby.
When: The evening after Roy's grumpy day.
Roy stamps his feet at the start of the lobby by total habit, scrape scrape, even though there's still going to be mud in his footprints when he tracks glumly across. He's in his red leathers but there hasn't been a fight - unless you count his internal struggle to not take Oliver Queen by the shoulders and shake him until he made sense.
"Welcome back, Harper." Donna's voice courses with warmth, but holds an underlying current of caution. It was slightly condescending to think of Roy as something cute and harmless, like a puppy. Nevertheless, it constantly came to mind when she thought of the "right" approaches to handling him (petting him, holding him, playing with him, what have you). She didn't want him to think she was playing an avoidance game at all, but in fact, it was hard to face him. So long did she go without even hope of seeing him here, and now here he was -- turns out he might have been here even longer than she had. Much longer. The thought unsettled her, but was strangely mystifying, as if maybe they had felt loneliness or thought of each other at the same moments.
She was kind of waiting there for him, periodically checking up on the lobby from a spot on the staircase, or from the kitchen. That wasn't pathetic, right?
She smiles at him, glancing down at his boots. "Oh, sure, take advantage of the Ghosts and their willingness to clean up whatever mess you make." She rolls her eyes. "You're such a man."
Somehow, just the sound of that voice makes some of his day better, lightens up the bits that don't really matter and puts a little dollop of balm on the open sores that do. It shows in the way he straightens his neck, sets his shoulders with a snort. How did it take him this long to come back to her?
"Hey, a little dirt never hurt anybody," he informs the lady on the staircase, and casually stops to lean on a chairback while he kicks off his shoes. "And some of us even like it." It's childish to flick a speck of mud at her even from this distance - and so he does it, because he's been the adult for two badly wrenched children all afternoon and he's taking some big-dumb-kid time in the backlash.
Accordingly the next move is to flop into that chair assfirst. It's really not used to that kind of abuse, but who cares? The ghosts can fix it.
She flinched slightly as the mud was flicked in her general direction --well, okay, what the hell? Only an archer could somehow make the speck hit right beneath her eye. Not that she had spent quite an amount of time fixing up today, except she had. Wiping at the mud with her knuckle, delicately, she managed a fond glare -- a categorical rarity that was reserved only for this particular redhead, and made her way closer. Fighting the urge to make some inappropriate comment about him needing a bath, she folded her arms and stared down at him, assessing his condition with a mixture of worry and relief.
"So I take it you had yourself a ton of fun, hm?"
"A blast." What's supposed to start as a dry grin is barely even recognizable as a threadbare smile by the time it makes its way up to her. The eye contact - her sincerity and care - crumbles him completely, and he shuts his eyes with a twisted grimace.
"No," he admits, dropping his head and caving in. "No, it's been a pretty shitty day, start to finish." His shoulders shake, a reflexive attempt to laugh it off. "What about you, have a good birthday?" Maybe they can still change the subject.
Or maybe not. She knew he was a master at deflecting, and usually, she let him have his way. His nonchalance about the general crappiness of his luck at this place unsettled her, though, and she very slowly walked around his chair, standing behind him. "The day's not finished, you know..." She offered a smile he couldn't see, her fingers curling against the nape of his neck lightly before dragging down to grip at his shoulders. "My birthday has been pretty nice. Of course," she trailed, breaking into a soft massage. "A cake's not a cake without a nice red cherry on top! Annnnd now I have you, here, so my wish came true. Guess you don't want to talk about what's bothering you?"
He hissed lightly, let his eyes fall shut at the pressure against the knots in his shoulders. Aah, god, that felt good. "Is this where I say -- nn. Harder. -- say something inappropriate -- about your little red cherry?"
If he didn't already look so exhausted, she might have found it needed to give him a light slap across the head. "I can think of a lot of other things that are red," she chirped in a falsely sweet tone. "Blood, finger marks on a face ..." Her own hands didn't have the cruelty in them, at the moment, to muster up a tight and painful Amazon grip at the knots in his shoulders. Instead, she kept up the careful kneading, enjoying that she was making him feel good. In fact, it felt nice to think that she might be the highlight of his crappy day.
"But enough about that." She drawled, complying and massaging harder. Yes, yes, Roy. We know you most likely destroyed any chance that white was appropriate on her wedding. "I missed you. You don't have any other plans for the evening, right?"
Now that was enough to pull a laugh out of the man, short and real. Nothing like being threatened by a beautiful woman to - ooh. - to pick up his mood. "Are you kidding? At this rate I'm not leaving this spot for another month."
For a handful of time longer, he just let her improve his day. But he had a weight on his mind a little bigger than backrubs and banter, much as he wished he could play it off. Besides, it would get tangled up with them all. He could just feel it.
There was another soft sigh. "Babe." He opened his eyes, fixed on a corner of the coffee table. "The name 'Reno Browne' mean anything to you?"
"Reno Browne?" She looked up thoughtfully, trying to rack her brain. In finality, she shook her head and made a small "Uh-uh" sound, running a hand through the man's hair -- a habit she couldn't ever really drop, she felt, even if they were to become mortal enemies one day. "Sorry, but ... I'm still relatively 'new' to this place, or at least, compared to some veterans here. Perhaps you'd have better luck asking them?"
She almost interrupted herself to add on that she did know A Reno at this place, but it obviously wasn't the person that he was talking about, when she gave it a second thought. "Was this someone ... you met?"
"Someone I knew." he confirmed, taking a moment to tilt into the pet like a lazy dog. "Pretty sure I knew. Rin and Raine Sage recognized the name." When he'd blurted it out in his first few seconds of consciousness. Like so many times over the last week, he tried one more time to reach back into the memory before that hazy awakening. Shadowed faces, echoed voices, a rhythmic thudding beat... and nothing.
He gave an annoyed tch, and leveled a look at the coffee table that could strip paint. "She sure thought she knew me when she dropped me a line this morning." His shoulders were tensing up again, coiling under Donna's familiar hands. "Wanted to know why I hadn't gotten my ass back out there yet. With them."
Whoever 'them' turned out to be.
His words elicited both a protective and almost possessive instinct in her, while simultaneously arousing a curiosity and sadness about just what in the hell he was doing out there in the first place. She was threatened, though, that whoever this girl was, she was still able to contact Roy. And maybe even wanted to in the future. Through excellent muscle control, however, she didn't let on any of this inner turmoil -- at least, not through the massage, which stayed firm and responsive to every slight movement or sound her former lover and teammate made.
"I've been trying to ... not ask too many questions about all of that." Donna's voice was careful and quiet. "But whoever this ... Reno girl is, she should know that you don't belong to anyone." She had to keep herself from snapping, through her tone had gotten a bit more brisk. "Well, anyone but the Titans. Us. Me. You know."
Roy allowed a decent span of silence to follow that. It wasn't an awful thing, to belong again, to be claimed. In fact it kind of felt nice, a home away from home. And damn near impossible, here, now, with the girl who'd been close to his heart since he was in freckles and feathercap, to seriously think about leaving.
'Can't risk any of them following,' his red-leathered ass.
"It's just as well." he finally said, slowly reaching up to curl a rough hand around Donna's wrist. "I don't have that many answers." He found her hand, tugged it close to lay his stubbled cheek in her palm. He lowered his eyelids near-shut. "But she gave me one more."
She was silenced at that, almost sedate for a moment. Her eyes stared guiltily at her own hand, before ruminating on his words. There was a recall of when those in the Castle began finding the village to be their "home." She then thought of that woman that Kyle became attached to --jealousy no longer arising in her, but instead, a curiosity laced with sadness. She always forgot that these people were individuals, somehow, even if they seemed to be different from the Castle residents. But what was Roy, then? Was he one of "us" or "them"? Where did he feel more comfortable? And why wouldn't he talk more about all of this?
"So she was your friend...?" She struggled to keep an accusing tone out of her voice. "Do you feel like you're letting her down? 'Them'?" Whoever the hell 'them' was. Donna didn't trust "them."
Roy sighed, breath gusting across her fingertips. "I don't know." he admitted, almost in defeat. "I remember her face, what she looked like, the way her voice had this husk... but I don't know who she is or who they are. And I don't... I can't put back together... who I was to them." He shook his head, slowly. Faces swirled around his mind when he grasped after them... nothing concrete.
"What I do know is..." and here his voice firmed, took back some of the customary stubbornness. "Anybody who tries to get me to leave you all without a word or a prayer is no friend of mine." He got his scowl on. "I don't care if I'd been running with them five years or five decades."
She pulled her hand away, not sharply, but the motion was quick enough to get a message across. A message, she thought, that might be misconstrued and correlated with his talk of Reno. It was more about the intimacy of his touch. She was intimate with a lot of her friends -- often kissing and hugging and caressing them at any moment she could. But with Roy, it obviously was different. It felt ... less innocent? Donna felt guilty, but there were lines to be drawn, of which were pressing in importance. Roy needed comfort, she knew that. But where he came from, he could take her kind of comfort in the wrong way, and she'd already played with his feelings, in a sense, before. There wouldn't be any of that again, and she had to make things clear, as ill-timed as they were what with his apparent trauma.
The Amazon used that very same hand she pulled away to pat his shoulder, giving him a sympathetic smile. And a relieved one. That last part? She liked. Not the five years part -- what in the hell? "You know that I can understand that," she sighed, in reference to his seemingly-amnesiatic episode. "It's frustrating, because it's going to nag at you, and you're going to search for something that you might not even want ... just so you can put those pieces together."
There was slight caution in her tone now, and maybe a bit of worry. "I wouldn't ... blame you if you wanted to find out more, though."
For a second there Roy's hand just hovered in the air, bereft. What did he do? Yeah, there was a message there, but... he'd been so stuck on his own mental gaps that he was just left flatfooted. After a moment's hesitation, he cautiously settled his hand back over hers, light, almost asking permission. The rules were always different with Donna. Every time.
He nodded, jaw still set. "A half-decade's a long time." he said heavily, a little distant. He'd barely had that much time with Lian-- which thought led him to shut his eyes, and fast. Not thinking about that right now. "I'll find what I can."
She closed her eyes, allowing his hand over hers. They had to find a balance, she knew that -- to express the closeness of their friendship, over a decade of knowing each other, really ... and it being something they'd both be happy and comfortable with. Donna spent too much time in her life being ambivalent, confused, and indecisive. Roy, Terry, and Kyle -- she felt that she didn't do right by any of those men, really, when she was with them. With Roy, they danced in a strange space between sharing parts of themselves with one another that no one else got to see, and between never achieving a true, unfettered and full closeness, without guards and walls up. With Terry, she had let go, and fallen completely in love. In the end, she let him down, always bringing nothing but danger and instability into their life. With Kyle, she felt as if she used him as an emotional punching bag when she was with him at times, and pushed him too hard when he wasn't ready. And then there was the way she broke it off and hurt him. Everyone dreamed of having second chances in life, and she was getting hers with Kyle. She wanted to keep building trust with him, and that meant being more honest to herself and with others.
And if she was honest with herself? The five years thing kept bothering her more than she liked to admit. She had only been at Paradisa for about eight months, and that she was experiencing the luxury of the Castle while Roy was "out there", with only the Gods knowing what happened to him, it unsettled her. She felt guilty for probing him with questions, but she was curious, and felt like she could relate on a very deep level.
"You hungry at all, Robin Hood?"