A/N: So this is happening. The ending to "Angel of the Abyss", my precious project that I love and hold dear to me. Ah, I'm so glad I got around to finishing this. I hope you all enjoy the conclusion!

Disclaimer: Don't own YJ.

IV - Delusion

He'd decided not to get a drink on his way home from work today, show Wally that he was strong enough, that he could try. It was rough, walking past the bar and hearing the clamor and clinks of glasses and men. But he could also smell the sadness seeping out of the place and knew he was headed somewhere better.

Up the winding stairs, he took his time, knowing that there was no rush to get to Wally, that he would be there. He fumbled with the keys after discovering it was locked, wondering why Wally didn't unlock it in the course of the day. And he pressed the key where it belong and shouldered the door open into his smoke-laced, beer-stained apartment. The home of a rotting man.

And the first thing he saw was Wally standing there with a broken face and tear-stained cheeks and a knife in his hand.

Roy dropped his wallet, dropped the keys, and stood there, a deer in headlights as he watched his boyfriend shiver and shake as he stood there. "Wa-Wally?"

"I found this-" Words crackled as he choked up. His voice was like that of a wife with evidence of a cheating husband. The tone was entirely more heart wrenching and the disappointment Roy felt in himself was heavier than any other weight he could bear. Wally fought to continue. "I found this-" Sniffle. "-behind the tv." His whole body was quaking. "Were you going to kill yourself, Roy?"

His mouth gaped as he grasped desperately for words that seemed lightyears away now. He remembered standing at that window and staring at the sun and wondering where his sunshine had gone as he was plagued by shadows of doubt and hate, but now it was back- Wally was here, everything would be okay, everything would be just fine-

"I want you to be safe, Roy." His voice had melted into more of a demand, but the sobbing had yet to cease. "I want you to keep going, I-" He held up the knife and looked at the blade again, and his lips were moving as he tried to search for some explanation. "This can't be the end of you."

Clarity.

The alcohol-induced coma had lifted as he leaned away from beer and whiskey and tried to haul himself up again.

And now he was up again. And down came the pain and washed it all out.

Wally wasn't here. Wally was never here.

As Roy stared at his boyfriend, it all flashed, strobing his brain with awful images of that arrow cutting through the air, about ready to take down Vandal Savage once and for all, but there were these damn heroics that went into it all. And he couldn't handle what came next.

"Wally-" He collapsed, falling next to his keys and wallet, the only things he knew he really had: a name and a residence. Everything else suddenly seemed so false. "Oh god, Wally-"

"You can't do this to me, Roy," he cried. Wally's chest was heaving as he breathed, his cheeks drenched in tears that dribbled down his chin and onto his slowly soaking shirt. "I need you to keep going. You can't go out like this. Not after everything we've been through." His words were sharp as he kept forcing breaths. "This isn't the end."

These damn heroics. Roy's moral compass had always been askew but to watch his boyfriend trying to rescue him from prosecution only to take the arrow himself, right between the eyes, to watch the blood and life spill out of his body, to watch his feet stop, to see him collapse on the ground, a pile of nothing-

He threw the knife down with a clatter, the blade bouncing around for a moment, catching the sunlight, glinting in the sunshine. Wally moved forward standing over Roy, fighting for air. "I don't want to see you die, not like this."

"I didn't want to see you die," whispered Roy, his own face ruddy and stained.

"It's not your fault."

"I killed you."

The arrow's red feathers stuck out of his head like a marker to say who's kill it was. It was obvious. He'd killed his own lover. His best friend. The boy he wanted to marry. And he was dead.

"You were doing something good." Wally slowly, shakily, knelt down to Roy's level, looking at his curled up pile of a boyfriend with bloodshot eyes. "I got in the way."

"I KILLED YOU!" he roared, as if trying to scare away this illusion, this daydream, this reverie. He wanted to shatter it so the guilt that was being poured so thickly down his throat would stop drowning him. The knowing was guilt enough to bear as his cross.

Wally's shaking fingers reached out to touch Roy's hair and tousle the mess that it was; Roy himself couldn't figure out what the sense of feeling was when this delusion was all in his head. "It's okay."

His shoulders shook with throat-burning sobs as he felt hot tears searing his already red cheeks. Roy remembered it all. And he remembered not being able to say any last words or being able to hold Wally for one last time. And suddenly, he wasn't sure why he was so angry.

It happened. The suffering was immense. And he would take steps to recover. But right now was not the time.

He leaned forward and took what he could of that moment, grasping a Wally by the torso and holding him tight, squeezing him, both still crying. "I'm sorry," Roy managed to gasp. "I'm sorry."

"I know," Wally murmured, running his hands through Roy's hair, trying to settle him the best way he knew how. "It's okay."

"I love you." Roy sounded more like he was begging than anything else, as if he were pleading Wally to stay.

But the drunken stupor had gone, replaced by sobriety's sanity. And he was grasping at air, holding onto nothing. Roy fell forward, his face hitting the hard floor as he swallowed his fears and cried some more.

It took a few hours worth of emotional recovery and puzzle work for Roy to collect himself enough to enable mobility. His head and heart were so mangled by the thought of everything from the last few days being his own mad delirium.

He started with his hands, moving his fingers to make a fist, then using that fist as a base to steady his shaking self as he struggled to push his trembling body off the floor.

And as he sat up and stared around his apartment, he remembered that he was alone. That sunshine smile was gone now; the funeral suit was still hanging in the back of his closet. Roy fumbled for a second, gritting his teeth and fighting to keep himself under control, knowing that he'd been forgiven, that he had his closure now.

It all hurt no less than before.

Upon settling for a second time, his eyes fell on the glint of daylight. The knife on the floor. The clattering sound remained fresh in his mind.

He watched it, remembering the haze that had put him so close to falling dead by that blade. Alcohol. Fear. Doubt. Hate. He would have died alone and depressed in his own home, a body only to be found after rotting for days and weeks, the smell the only thing to say that he had once been alive and that he was now gone and not missed.

He rose, bearing the weight of the cross on his back, his crux to carry onward. And he bent down slowly to pick up that knife, watching the blade glint. The sunshine caught it, rays of light to say that life existed, also to say that it could be taken away at any moment. One second a heartbeat, the next filled with silence. That knife showed a divide. And he put it away in the kitchen drawer.

Hope.

A/N: I appreciate all of your support and comments! (And one of the last reviews actually had it correct, which I enjoy even more because it means I wrote it so you could catch on.) Anyways, please leave a review with your thoughts and feedback!

~Sky