Prompt Post - Part Four [CLOSED TO NEW PROMPTS]
THIS PART IS NOW CLOSED. YOU CAN CONTINUE POSTING FILLS, BUT PLEASE PROMPT ALL NEW THINGS HERE.
Part one here!
Part two here!
Part three here!
Feel free to reprompt posts from parts one, two, three in part four once. If you do so, I'd recommend leaving a link to your fill on the original prompt, in case somebody is tracking the first thread.
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He doesn't recognize the face in the mirror.
It might be the change in costume or the five-o-clock shadow. Most likely it's the fact that he hasn't eaten in a few days because half his cash went to rent and the other half to junk, and the skin is stretching tight across his cheekbones and eye sockets. The reason isn't important. He looks different.
Maybe, he thinks as his hand reaches up to traces the line of his own jaw in the reflection (his left is its right, his right is its wrong), this is the way he was always meant to look.
If Ollie hadn't picked him up and taught him how to hold a bow and what it was like to be a hero, maybe Roy would have looked like this years ago. If he had never spent the afternoons with Robin and Wally, shooting the breeze and occasionally trading playful punches. He's probably just returning to his intended state. Like entropy.
The face in the mirror creases in a frown. Is that what entropy really means? It doesn't matter.
The hand reaches past the face, opening the mirror to reveal the oh-so-normal cabinet behind it. It was one of the reasons Roy chose this apartment. For all that the place is dank and dripping and he can hardly afford it anyway because heroism doesn't pay all that well, it still has a cabinet behind the bathroom mirror. All mirrors, he thinks, should have something behind them.
On the third shelf up is what he wants, a single needle which at one point had been intended to inject life-giving insulin into the subcutaneous fat of a diabetic he had carried to the hospital a few weeks ago. He can remember the feeling of her in his arms, trashing with seizure as he ran and tried to force store-snatched orange juice down her throat at the same time.
He had taken the needles from her purse while the doctors administered the glucagon, and had been gone before she regained consciousness.
The needle was never meant to pierce the vein and, having been used numerous times before, it's almost too blunt to serve its purpose but he takes it down from the shelf anyway. The pieces he needs are balanced neatly on the side of the sink; spoon, candle (lit), tourniquet, junk. The process is automatic, he's already got the mixture of water and powder heating over the candle before he blinks.
He closes the mirror before loading the needle, and again he doesn't recognize the face he sees there.
There's a woman looking back at him. Her hair greasy and her breasts sagging almost out of sight. She's completely naked, but Roy can't find it in him to be disgusted or aroused.
She has something that looks like a fishhook around her finger and at he watches she presses it carefully into her skin at the crook of her left elbow. Blood flows freely from the wound, although she does not move her eyes from his for a moment. It's entrancing. He feels, for a moment, a little less alone.
Roy looks down for a moment and the needle is already sliding into his arm, in the exact same place as the stranger's hook.
He glances back at the mirror but the only face he sees is the one that must be his own. Roy pushes down on the plunger.
He's sitting under the sink (head leaning back against the exposed pipes) when he hears their voices. A familiar sound, deep and sore like she's been screaming.
"He is yours for the time being, my sister." She whispers because he cannot imagine her speaking louder.
He doesn't hear the response because he's flying. But for a moment he images something like laughter and the feeling of Ollie's fingers in his hair.
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This is so amazing. I love his quiet introspection, and of course Despair would take interest in Roy, ah, and the last line.
Crap, anon, this is so sad and so good.
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