Archive of Our Own ^beta

Hal likes butterflies.

It starts when he’s young, when he stands on his tiptoes and looks out the window of his home, watching them with one eye while the other aches and leaks underneath three layers of gauze. They flutter around outside, feather-light, gone with the wind. He wishes he could play in the front yard with them. Dad would call it a waste of time.

Mom would call it whatever Dad told her to, if she were here. If she wasn’t somewhere else beyond the butterfly grass.

Hal learns more and more about them, like how they migrate together. In the Americas they fly by the millions—that’s more than he’s ever seen through the glass, it’s so many that he can’t count them because he doesn’t know numbers high enough. He learns that Monarchs aren’t empresses, they’re a kind of butterfly that glows orange in the sun. And he learns that eyes aren’t just to see with, they’re to mimic on wings too, so bad things don’t eat you because they’re scared of being watched back.

Suddenly a hand curls around his small bicep, and he’s dragged to his room before he can say bye-bye, butterfly. Hal flinches as his father sits him down and unravels the fresh bandage around his head, wondering if mimicry is something he’ll have to learn too. See with one eye, pretend with the other. Pretend everything’s fine. Pretend so well that it keeps him from being eaten.

Martin places those first, bloody wraps on Hal’s bed and kneels in front of him. “Cover one eye and tell me what you see.”

His chest tightens. It’s the same voice his father uses when he says things like don’t flinch, a real Jordan isn’t afraid of anything, try again, stop with those tears. Hal knows that when he hears this voice he’ll be punished for failing. He doesn’t want it, he hates it, so he swallows the fear on his tongue and lies.

The world in front of him is blurred and shifting, but Hal says it all the same: “I can see you.”

There’s a noise that sounds like satisfaction. Hal knows he won’t be punished if he can keep this up, hide his mistake of not being able to see right.

“Is there anything you can’t? Anything that looks strange?”

Hal blinks, flaps his eyelid closed and then open. He’s mimicking perfectly. He’s a butterfly, fragile and once-pretty, flying under a sun that’s too hot, and one day he’ll migrate so far that he’ll lose the instinct to come home again.

Hal shakes his head and says no. No, Dad. Yes, I’m sure, Dad. I’d tell you if anything wasn’t perfect. I know what you think about liars.

Martin stands up again and mutters something under his breath, along with a name Hal doesn’t know and only connects into a faraway constellation later. Who is Leslie? Was that the doctor who came to their house that night to look at his face, explain to him what a concussion was and why it made him feel so bad he wanted to vomit?

Hal remembers how confused he was when she told him:

Something inside your head did this, Leslie—the nice doctor, dressed in white—told him. But how in the world could that be? It was just noise before, loud and bright, and then it spun and crashed and spun again until he couldn’t feel any other part of his body. Until Hal was nothing but the ache itself. A mistake. Wrong. Just like your father—he doesn’t love anyone, he lies, lies, lies.

Hal had wondered, Do butterflies scream?

And then, as the doctor dressed his wound while he swallowed his pain in front of his father: What if we just don’t listen to them?

In Hal’s room, Martin speaks in a different voice now. It’s not the terrifying one anymore.

“Hal…”

Hal takes his hand away from his eye, grateful the test is over, that he didn’t fail. He can still make out his father’s face, though it wavers at the edges, doubled in places… he looks sad, and Hal thinks maybe he’s wondering where Mom went, too. When Hal tries to remember the last time he saw her, his head goes fuzzy. Something flutters in his stomach that isn’t a butterfly because it’s liquid instead of wings, and it feels like it wants to hurt him. It’s the same feeling he gets when he wakes up from a nightmare that curdles his blood.

She’ll be back soon, Hal tells himself. It isn’t time to leave yet.

He watches obediently as his father sits on the bed beside him, pulling Hal into his arms and against his broad chest. Even through the shirt, the pressure makes the pounding in his head flare with pain. Hal breathes too quickly. The last thing his body wants to accept is this warmth—his warmth—it recoils from Martin with a primal fear of its own.

But squirming has only ever made his father squeeze tighter. Hal hears his own name muttered again and again, a lullaby with no song, comfort that only mimics what it’s supposed to feel like. It isn’t real. His ears are ringing, the butterflies all learned how to scream and how to make him listen to their pain.

“Where’s Mom?” Hal chokes out, because he wishes it was her arms around him.

Martin is silent for so long afterward that Hal thinks he’ll be in this prison forever, locked in his father’s arms as they crush him into a small, trembling ball. He’d rather be punished for a thousand lies than stay here. For as many lies as he knows numbers to count.

“She left you,” Martin finally says, but it can’t be true. No, no. Now he’s the one lying. That’s all wrong. It’s a lie, a lie, lie lie lie.

Hal buries his face against his father’s chest, because the pounding in his skull is worth not crying where he can see. The tears will blur his vision, the redness will be too obvious to hide, and Hal’s racking sobs will just look like he’s trembling. Like he’s mad at Mom for leaving him. Like it hurts. Like he’s dizzy while the world spins.

The dizziness grows to match him, and Hal suffers there in silence. He aches even when there’s no pain. And in all the years that follow, he never manages to fly. Not even once.

“Hal.”

It’s his mother’s voice now—or it’s his father’s again, lying to him, lying. It’s someone else he doesn’t know and never will. It’s a noise in the breeze pretending to be a person, and he can either resist or spread his arms and let it take him somewhere else.

But somewhere is here. It’s right now.

He opens his eyes again, and he’s in a garden, or a park, and it’s too early in the morning to be outside. But he realizes with a start—a deep breath—that he doesn’t care. There’s no such thing as a waste of time. There’s dew on the grass beneath the thick blanket he’s sitting on, and the world has never wanted him more. There’s no window keeping him from touching it.

Mindlessly, Hal smooths his hand down a patch of grass and watches the blades curl back up and straighten again.

“Hal.”

Bruce is staring at him like he’s lost his mind, his eyebrows knotted together, but Hal isn’t looking at his face—he’s looking just above it. His vision blurs on one side, sharp on the other. He sees what he saw before, what made him think about the memories that cripple him to relive again—to remember how it felt to become absent.

There’s a butterfly on Bruce’s head, and the fool doesn’t even know it.

Hal blinks very carefully and tells him, “Don’t move.” It feels important that he doesn’t let it get away, not before he can catch it once. Twice. Learn where it wants to go and what brought it here if it wasn’t the wind. And not before he knows what it looks like.

Bruce tilts his head in annoyance, hair shifting with it, but for whatever reason the butterfly stays put. “You’re going to have to start explaining sometime,” he says flatly.

There’s no doubt he’ll brush it off if Hal tells him now. So as softly as he can, Hal shuffles forward and says, “Please,” until he’s close enough to reach out and cup his hands above its wings. “You’ll scare it away.”

Bruce goes still, like a shadow passing over him, and shoots Hal a look sharp enough to cut. “You’re going to scare me away if you keep acting like this,” he mutters.

There! Hal quickly pulls his hands back and feels it inside them, alive, its wings brushing against his palms so gently as they flutter for more air. Pleading him for it. Screaming for it.

He opens his hands just enough for Bruce to get a peek before he loses his patience.

“I could’ve caught it,” Bruce says, rolling his eyes and running a hand through his hair like butterflies are beneath his notice.

Hal’s throat tightens while he holds it. It’s hard to speak, for whatever reason. He takes his time, staring through the little opening between his fingers that lets the sunlight filter through. The colors light up inside: burnt orange, daisy highlights, gray outlines on the wings. It’s one of the species that mimics eyes. They’re green—oh, they’re so green. Not the bad kind of green, either; there’s enough purple in them to turn it into something else entirely, something that feels almost like memory.

Hal doesn’t know what the butterfly is called, but for a long time he didn’t know what he was, either.

He covers the opening with his fingers again, and finally he’s ready to speak. He took too long, but Bruce has always been used to silence. Bruce still looks about ready to snap—or kiss him—it’s always hard to tell which.

“Maybe it thought your hair was a flower,” Hal murmurs.

Bruce ruffles his dark hair again, like he’d rather it look messy and undone than be compared to something soft. “My hair doesn’t look like a flower. It probably got confused by the green light coming off your ring. You’re the one giving it whiplash.”

Hal smiles at Bruce, at the butterfly he holds, at the decision to let it go. Except it must’ve grown fond of him, because it just keeps sitting there even when he opens his hand. Its wings swing up and down like someone testing for squeaky hinges. But it’s probably more like a cat cleaning itself—or like Bruce fixing his own hair after Hal’s teasing because he hates when it’s out of place.

“It’s pretty,” Hal says. The butterfly twitches its antennae, thanks him. “It’s missing a forewing, though.” He doesn’t sound sad. Why should he be? It still managed to fly here, to land on something steadier than itself. This butterfly made it out into the world just fine.

Bruce stares at him. A piece of his hair is still sticking the wrong way, but Hal keeps that as his own little secret.

“You a bug expert now, flyboy?” Bruce asks dryly.

“I’m just saying.”

“You’re being weird,” Bruce mutters, but it’s softer this time.

He isn’t serious, but at the same time, he kind of is. Instead of answering, Hal watches the butterfly move its wings some more because it’s mindless, the simplest thing to do. He notices how different they look underneath now—shimmery, a rich gray with no patterns at all. The dark side. The once-pretty side. The bad side no one sketches in notebooks or wants to see out in the wild, so it hides this side under pretend eyes that lie and lie and lie—

And under warm colors that say don’t look closer , because things aren’t always what they seem on the inside. It doesn’t want to be destroyed, it just wants to live. Another day. A week at most, struggling brutally in those last few hours. It thinks Hal’s hand is safe right now because there are no monsters in its world—no rings, no crashes, no fear made flesh. It hasn’t learned how to scream yet, because all it knows are flowers and sun and the grass that glitters underneath it.

Hal doesn’t know how to explain any of it to Bruce, or if he ever could.

But sometimes he doesn’t have to. Bruce is good like that—he sees all the potholes in the road Hal drives, big, small, it doesn’t matter. It’s too late to pretend they aren’t there because Bruce refuses to get out of the car, and Hal refuses to stop driving. So Bruce’s hand is the one that reaches out and swerves the wheel in Hal’s place, before Hal even realizes how close they both came to crashing.

Bruce reaches out now, a little like that.

“Let me hold it.”

Hal trusts him more than anyone. It isn’t that he doesn’t.

It isn’t that Hal thinks Bruce would crush it in his hand—impulsive, thoughtless—or that he doesn’t even want to hold it at all. That he’s just saying he does so he can take it away. Take the one thing Hal loves. Because it could all be a lie, a lie, a lie. He wants to kill it. This, the only thing Hal finds warmth in anymore. The thing that’ll be corrupted if it stays too long, because it’s the best thing in Hal’s life—but that’s exactly why he isn’t allowed to have it. Not when Bruce is the only thing Hal needs, the one he obeys and lives with, who keeps him grounded and locked away until Hal forgets what air feels like. Just that it isn’t fear. Air is clean. It’s what butterflies fly in. Hal wouldn’t know, because lies kept him in the smoke.

And the doctor never said a word.

And his father is a liar too.

He can tell the truth if he wants now, but the butterfly in Hal’s palm still screams in dissonance, and it promises him that chamomile tea will always say more than Martin’s half-spoken apologies ever could.

Hal is somewhere else now. But he doesn’t know where “somewhere else” is.

When Hal looks down, the butterfly in his palm is coal black with four white dots, all slightly different sizes—and when he squints, he almost sees a family. It’s so sudden. It makes him happy; he wants them to see it too. Hal needs them to know what his world looks like, because no one has ever asked him. The butterfly flaps in his hands as he runs into the house, frantic, scared he’ll lose it before he has the chance to make them all as happy as he is.

His mother turns around from the stove, squatting down and tucking a strand of hair behind her ear before reaching to do the same for Hal. Her smiles wide at the sight of the butterfly. She means it when she says it’s nice. She tells the truth just like the doctor did. Responsibility doesn’t mean repression, and his mother never hides her true feelings so deep down that they rot on the way back up.

Jim narrows his eyes and doesn’t know what to say at all. He makes a noise Hal hasn’t yet learned is jealousy, and ruffles his hair in a way that tells him to leave big brother alone. But his eyes say get out of my sight . They say you’re the golden boy, of course you’re only worried about butterflies. One day, Jim will finally say that it’s all okay. But Hal never knew he needed his little brother’s forgiveness.

Jack grabs for the butterfly the second he sees it, before Hal can say a word or tell him to be gentle. He would’ve hurt it if Hal hadn’t pulled away first, and now Hal’s protecting it with his life, keeping it safe from bad things that don’t fear fake eyes. Jack didn’t mean to though—it wasn’t his fault. He wouldn’t have really killed it. He was just born careless. That’s what everyone else says. And his family would never, ever lie to him.

He watches Bruce balance the butterfly onto one hand, waiting until it’s steady. Then he touches Hal with the other—the hand that’s free—touches him through silences that feel like lullabies, through comfort anyone else would call reckless, through shadows he created and only sometimes admits are love. The pounding in Hal’s head doesn’t ache as sharply anymore, but Bruce is careful like he’s touching another butterfly—though not too careful, because then Hal would roll his eyes and call him out for it. Bruce knows everything he needs to know and not a word more.

Hal wants to close his eyes and hum under the touch, but keeping them open means he gets to see Bruce concentrate, see the way he looks at him—god, the way he looks at him—so that’s the option Hal chooses every time.

He doesn’t even realize what Bruce is doing until careful tracing and furrowed brows turn into outright wiping, followed by a little smirk Hal could absolutely kill him for. Bruce is rubbing sweat into Hal’s cheek, as if to sweeten him up—so the butterfly will stay when Bruce gently nudges it from the tip of his finger onto Hal’s skin. Leave it to Batman to even have sweet on him.

And the butterfly stays. Its wings spread across his eye, not that it makes a difference—not more than shutting it and letting the blur take over. But Hal isn’t sad about it. Why should he be? He still managed to get here, to find someone steadier than himself. He made it out into the world just fine.

Hal’s vision is something he stopped lying about years ago, and the only punishment he got was the one he gave himself: permanence. The blurriness never really goes away—and maybe it could’ve been fixed once, but not now, the doctor said. Not ever. Her name wasn’t Leslie; she wasn’t lying to him.

But Hal’s learned how to tell when people do.

It’s in the eyes.

No pretending, no distractions, no mimicry. Just clear, wide-open truth, the way the universe intended. It’s whether their pupils dilate when they tell him they love him—like Jack’s do, like Carol’s did, like Bruce’s always have, from the very beginning. When love was just a pipe-dream dressed up in shadows and smoke, and Hal swallowed it whole because it was the only kind of smoke he could ever live for. Nothing so sweet in this whole, broken world.

And then this whole, broken world tells him it isn’t done yet—he has to see if their eyes dilate when they say sorry, too. They all did. Even if Bruce’s sins don’t compare to the rest. But Jim’s did, and his mother’s did too, though she couldn’t always look directly at him when the pain showed through. So Hal knows they weren’t lying. Even if everything after that got very, very difficult.

His father eyes might have dilated too, maybe, if only he hadn’t turned into a butterfly himself.

Hal breathes now—so deeply he’s sure he isn’t allowed to take this much. Somewhere feels constant, ever-present; it’s the blanket under him, the sun climbing too high because Hal needs these dozens of empty minutes for air, and Bruce keeps letting him have them.

He stares past the edge of the wing through the blur, to where Bruce leans back and takes in the sight of him—Hal, kissed by a butterfly. And it’s obvious there isn’t a bone in Bruce’s body that thinks this is a waste of time.

“…Beautiful,” Bruce murmurs, blinking once, pupils dilating.

And all Hal can do is fall back, and fly.