Roy Harper is fourteen years old, and everything is bleeding.

It's his fault.

He doesn't go to his father's funeral after the man bled out beneath his fingertips and he could not save him. Instead, Roy goes cage fighting—six rounds, letting the screams of the men outside the ring carry him past grief and futility and fear into nothing.

Roy Harper doesn't go home that night—or many nights after. It's not like his mom is around to notice—there is cocaine and men and her own pursuit of oblivion. He doesn't blame her. He's looking for it, too.

His oblivion is red.

Red knuckles, split on his opponent's jaw.

Red mouth, dripping from the hit he took (but he did not did not did not fall).

Red hoodie, big enough to grow into—and he has a lot of growing to do.

He stays in the glades mostly, getting angrier and angrier. Once, he sleeps next to a dumpster because home is too far away, and he wakes with a knife to his throat. He doesn't sleep outside again, though the man who held the knife to him didn't walk away from that fight.

The world bleeds around him—doesn't stop bleeding, and he fights in the cage every weekend. He tells Sin and anyone else who will listen that it's because the money is good and his mom needs help.

It's true, but Roy Harper is a liar nonetheless, because it is ransom his fists seek.

He doesn't find it.

He knows that he won't.

(Hook, cross, lunge, duck. Nothing.)

Knockouts every week.

("This kid flies. Barely touches the ground.")

And yet he feels nailed to it.

He's arrested after one of the cage fights when he's sixteen, and it's for something stupid. It could have been anything—any number of purse snatchings or fistfights or even the occasional joints he lights up—and it happens because the bartender calls the cop because a sixteen year old is getting drunk in his bar.

He gets dragged down—out of the glades—and talks back to the officer. A detective walking by at the moment grins at his words; turns serious at the marks on his face.

"What happened, kid?"

"Not a kid," Roy says, and if he could disappear farther into his hoodie he would.

The cop snorts. "What're you doing here?"

"Underage drinking," the other cop answers for him. "We've called his mother."

"She's not on her way," Roy says, smirking (because what else do you do when your mom is in bed coming down from a high and your father is cold cold cold under the ravaged earth of the glades?).

It's true.

He should spend the night there; they would release him in the morning. Standard procedure.

The detective drives him home.

"Detective Lance," the man says. "And you're Roy? Roy Harper?"

He should be grateful. Should be kind. Should be something.

(Other than guilty guilty guilty because he cannot undo anything that has been done).

"Be careful out there," Lance says as he exits the car, and Roy doesn't bother responding.

He is 17 when his nose is broken in a fight and he gets sent to the hospital on the wrong side of town, far from the comfortable dimness of the glades.

He is being wheeled down the hall when he runs into a man with raggedly long hair and a beard that needs shaving. The man has a baseball cap low over his eyes, and the nurse wheeling Roy stops to ask if he needs help.

Roy can see nothing but the man's eyes—intense, blue, focused (but alive, and Roy wonders what that must be like).

"No thank you," the man says politely, and he talks like a rich white kid even if he looks like as much trash as Roy.

He is 19 when his life is ripped from under his feet when he robs a rich girl of her purse.

Only—

It's not just a rich girl.

She has dark hair and She is slender and angry and made of steel. He wonders what Her oblivion looks like (but sometimes he forgets to wonder, because the red of Her lips is a different kind of red than he is used to).

She shows up at his door to demand Her purse back and god it is killing him to play it cool when his heart is knocking against his chest like a hammer and Her eyes are roving his face.

She looks ravenous—and Roy Harper is living just to be consumed.

Things don't change, though, not really, until he is dragged away by a madman with a gun and he is hung up to die.

"Why should you live?" the madman demands, and he thinks of Her, but she's a reason he wants to live, not a reason he deserves to.

"I shouldn't," he whispers, and he's waiting for the bullet greedily (oblivion is louder now, and when he looks down the abyss beneath him is red, but not Her red, and he is still so damn scared to die).

There's the click of the trigger and he's waiting to die until a harsh voice calls from past the brink:

"Let the kid go."

And Roy Harper sags against the seat of the swiftly moving train and bows his head in his hands as he tries to understand what the man meant by second chance.

He understands, as he always does, in terms of colors:

Green.

And everything is new.

Months pass and She says I love you for the first time and a man in a green hood reminds Roy that his life can be worth something.

There are still fights, though not cage fights, and red is no longer the color of oblivion but of ransom in the form of a broken arrow he leaves in an alleyway for the vigilante to find.

Time passes, filling him (sometimes with grief or loss or anger, but with friendship and hope and Her) again. He is no longer just a red shell, no longer just a waste.

He visits his father's grave occasionally (and sometimes Oliver comes with him, silently, a hand on his shoulder, or She comes to weave her fingers through his and lean her head against his shoulder). He fights—with them. For them.

John Diggle, who looks out for him (Roy knows that, spots him even though the man is stealthy); makes sure he gets home safe on the nights when the glades are wilder than usual.

Felicity, the only person who can make Oliver smile like that.

And Oliver himself, with the promise to never abandon him.

And Her. Always Her. She has fallen and grieved and changed, but there is still steel in Her spine and fire in Her heart and compassion in Her eyes and god how is he allowed to be this lucky?

So this time, when oblivion catches up with him, he goes quietly to face it.

He would like to say that he is less afraid this time, but when there is a knife in his side, he discovers that red it still red.

But it's worth it. It's worth it. It's worth it.

He can bear the weight of it now; the weight of their sadness as they say goodbye; the weight of ending as he climbs into a red bullet of a car and speeds away from their stooped, sorrowful shoulders.

He can bear it.

Almost.

He thinks of Her as he reaches the edge of the city, and it is only then that the sobs rip through his body more forcefully than any knife ever has.

Roy Harper feels like he is fourteen and alone again—but at least this time, the only one bleeding is him.