I watched young justice. Bad idea.

The idea behind this fic is going to be sporadic. It won't all be from Conner's point of view, and they won't all be little drabbles and oneshots. It's going to a bunch of things. Conversations and texts and emotions and different styles and lengths all jumbled into one anthology, confusing and a pastiche but all moving towards Conner and M'gann healing, learning, and growing - together.

Each piece is canonical to one another. Time in between is indeterminate and up to interpretation.

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where do we go from here?

Her eyes linger.

They have for a while now, and he has since lost count of the days since it actually meant something again. Because for many months it hadn't - or so he told himself. Because it didn't, and it was him, all too familiar with her and her essence and her being, that was only taking it as more than it was. Because if he were to assume it was something more, it would bring everything back - the ghostly touch in his brain that left tendrils of ice somehow not cold, but the anger that blossomed at the pit of his stomach at the realization.

But that was long since over. Her eyes continue to linger.

And he let them.

Because he isn't sure what they are, not anymore. Not since the fight and the yelling and the touch and the breakup, oh the breakup, followed by months of radio silence and static and cold. Real cold, this time, not the kind that left pleasant shivers like little frosted kisses along the side of his head. Not since the confusion and the confiding and the stupid pride he felt when he knew she came to him and not the other, a stupid pride he later felt guilty and ashamed of because it damn meant nothing now; he had made sure of that. He let them because she came clean and she's stopped and she's still as beautiful of a soul as always, and their bodies touched and their fingers twined but then she slips away, from his grasp and from his mind, a shyness that is both sad and full of longing to the point he can't discern who it even came from to begin with.

Yet, her eyes linger.

He meets her gaze.

He sees it in her eyes, her face: a softened lip, just a hint of movement as the corner twists upwards. A small flush in her cheeks that she never quite got rid of, even after the four years they were together - and the one when he couldn't call her his. Small dimples emerge from green skin, the grooves and pores and freckles all familiar under his thumb, under his gaze, and he realizes that in that one, short year, her face hasn't changed. It would still be smooth to the touch, only wrinkled by upturned eyebrows and her bright smile, because she was M'gann; the one he knew he loved with all his life.

It hurt. A different kind of hurt from before. No longer stinging but somehow just as deep. He wanted to reach outwards, to be able to reclaim what he'd long lost, to truly know that the smile was only saved for him and no one else and that the look in her eyes, the tender softness of her gaze, was because of him. Too long had he gone seeing that expression - different, but it was still that expression - aimed beyond his shoulder to the one he knew was behind him. It hurt, because it was so easy to just extend an arm. Accept her. And it hurt because he couldn't.

He couldn't do it.

Not yet.

He looks down, just fast enough to miss her eyebrows falling and that upturned twist instead curve in the opposite. His name is on her lips and there's a small part of him that can appreciate how it's verbal and not mental, but it too dies on her mouth. He can hear the rustling of fabric and a small sigh pass through her lips.

And then he hears the sound of her footsteps, amplified so that they might be merely a foot away from him - when in reality, they go the other way.