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thejusticelounge2014-03-27 09:09 am
bossymarmalade) wrote in thejusticelounge2014-03-27 09:09 am
destiny
You find yourself in a library, within which are archived an overwhelming number of books, as well as everything else from stone tablets and papyrus scrolls, to CD-ROMs and floppy disks, to flash drives and laptops. You are among nine people: Oliver Queen, Mia Dearden, Damian Wayne, Bruce Wayne, Steph Brown, Zatanna Zatara, Zach Zatara, Kate Spencer and Jason Blood
Your injuries have been fully healed.
There is an owl and a raven perched on the bower of an open doorway, and they seem to be bickering at each other and ignoring you and your group. Eventually they quiet and still when a figure steps into the room.
He is tall and robed, his face hidden in the shadows of the hood. He carries in one hand a large book and in the other a shepherd’s crook.
"Welcome. You may call me Destiny. First I shall assure you that everyone you care about is safe. Some have been restored to their homes on Earth. I will explain this situation." Destiny goes on to explain:
"Your path homewards is through this door, and you may each go through and speak your confession. Once you go through to the next room, you will be in the realm of the beings. We will not protect you. Fight and you will die. Speak the truth and you will live. Your destiny awaits. You must leave.” Destiny points towards the doorway and the owl and raven each sound out their birdcall, which echoes in the great library.
"Now go."
”A confession…” Ollie repeated to himself, but there was no more time for questions or musing. No sooner had he stepped through the door (almost without realizing he was doing it, and with a last panicked thought that he should have looked back first, kissed Mia and Kate and Bruce goodbye, as if he’s descending into the underworld and won’t have the chance to look back again) than the whole scene shifted around him.
There was no arrayed tribunal, no mystical querent, no robed priest there to take this confession.
There was his Uncle Thomas.
"Jesus," Ollie said, with a sound somewhere between a laugh and a choke. "I almost didn’t recognize you."
His uncle regarded him with a look of cold, indifferent distaste, and Ollie pressed his lips together, closing his eyes and nodding. Yeah, that look brought it back. The same look that Thomas had turned on Ollie aged nine, when he was fresh off the private flight from Tanzania and still shaking with the memory of hot screams and blood, still learning the word ‘orphan’. The look that Robert had worn when he packed his nephew off to one boarding school after another, sometimes while Ollie begged and wailed to not be sent away again.
So. With that look. “Okay,” Ollie said. “Yet another round of having to entreat you to let me go home, huh? All right. You got it.
Here’s my confession, then: I didn’t even wanna fucking leave this ant farm you dropped us into.” Ollie took a breath. “After Connor got here, especially. Why would I want to? I had my whole family there with me. But more than that, more than that and as selfish as fucking hell, I had Kate and Bruce with me.”
Ollie shook his head, hands balling into fists. “God, you don’t know how much I wanted to keep everything just like that, the three of us living together and sleeping together and waking up with each other, instead of having to go back to the world, our opposite coasts, logistics and separation and complications. Everything seemed sweet and perfect and easy here, first. And even when it all went horrible. Even now, now at the end, after all the horror everybody’s gone through. I’d still want to stay here just to have them with me, all the time.”
He finished there, a flush creeping up his throat and face, and there was silence. Ollie was just about to shout at the apparition of his uncle, demand a response, when Thomas rose, walked over, and handed Ollie a thin cardboard sleeve.
"What—" Ollie began, and then stopped. He was holding an airplane ticket back to Star City. He looked up again, but his Uncle Thomas was gone.
And then, finally, Ollie was too.
For some reason, a half dozen pop culture references flickered through Kate’s head at once, all of them something just on the tip of her tongue to quote wryly, then vanished just as quickly as they had come (it is your destiny speak friend and enter only the penitent man will pass I’m your density welcome to the afterlife jean-luc you’re dead and I’m god this is the end my dear old friend the end, sweeping away with each step she took and gone by the time she was through the door).
Kate was so very tired of dancing to everyone else’s tune, tired of the shock she got when she saw who was waiting for her, so so tired, almost tired enough to die—but she couldn’t stop her reaction anyway.
"Mama," she said, and sat down on the kitchen chair across from her, the crumbling old apartment kitchen around them, a smell of humid smog and linoleum, old cooking and blood Kate hadn’t realized she’d never forgotten. The woman, her mama, was right but different than she ever remembered her being, or maybe that was because Kate’s memories were in fragments she never wanted to piece back together. So young, a decade younger than Kate herself was now.
Despite her not wanting it to, it worked.
Kate wrapped her gauntleted hands around the mug of cafe de olla that sat in front of her on the table, pondered the cinnamon stick that emerged jauntily from it for a long moment, then said, without looking up, “I want the baby. Ours, all three of ours, like she was. And it’s so stupid, because everything else that comes with it terrifies me. To be pregnant, and every single logistical issue that arises, and because Ollie refuses to let himself think about it, fights it, and Bruce doesn’t talk about anything without a fight. And because I’m selfish, I don’t want to not be able to be Manhunter, and I don’t want all the risks. And—” her voice cracked, “because I didn’t even plan my son, was a shitty mother to him for so long.”
She looked up, at her mama, said in a cold, despairing voice. “How can I betray him like that? Even think about it? But I do. And I have her, at least, in that golden little fantasy world in my head, the blue-sky plan. She is still there and she is ours, and you fuckers had to shit on even that for laughs.”
Her mama gestured to the coffee mug instead of responding, even as Kate felt herself biting her lip, about to dash it against the wall, scream and sob. The gesture was obvious: drink up.
"I don’t want t—”
But the reflex, the muscle memory of her mama’s requests when she was small, made her do it. Cinnamon and sugar and orange and bitter coffee flooded her tongue, her mind, her soul, home—
And Kate Spencer was swept away with it.
She almost feels like someone shoved her through the creepy doorway before she could even look around. Look around at the people with her, and the weird library that kind of reminded her of that one library in A:TLA with that weird owl thing. And she wondered if they were underground or something. Well it didn’t matter.
It definitely didn’t matter because when she went through the doorway the room changed darastically to somewhere you know would never be in a place like this. It was a small room with floresant lighting, a medical bed set up in the middle, cabnets and shelves set up around the room with tons of medical supplies situated around. Of course she knew where she was, she had been to her doctors office so many times it was ridiculous. So, Mia hopped up on the bed, the paper on it crinkling a bit as she got situated. As if on cue her Doctor walked in, though she knew it wasn’t actually her doctor.
"So, a confession…" Mia said trailing off and resting her hands in her lap as she thought swinging her feet back and forth the heels of her boots hitting against the metal of the bed stand. "You know when like… someone asks you what your favorite song is and suddenly you forget every single song you’ve ever listened to? That’s sort of like what this feels like…" She explains and laughs a sort of nervous fake awkward laugh that you usually used in uncomfortable situations, like going to the doctors. Her doctor didn’t even move. "Right…"
What was she supposed to confess? There were so many things…
Mia bit down on her lip and thought. And thought. Making little hm sounds every now and then. She almost thought whatever had taken the form of her Doctor was getting impatient but maybe she was just projecting.
"Ok, it’s just that there are so many things I haven’t told anyone it’s so ridiculous." Mia said and shook her head a bit. "Like I could tell you so many things that would fit this criteria but I’m trying to think of something particularly poingent. Like… some sort of lesson I’ve learned from this whole experiance or I’ll feel like it was a waist of time."
She fell silent for a moment again, before she took a deep breath, “But really I think this whole Cachement thing was good for me. I mean it was horrible but it made me… think about things. Things I hadn’t ever really thought about much because it was easy not to think about them. Like what would I do if I wasn’t HIV positive, nothing. Because… it was weird I still… I don’t know I guess didn’t have time to break out of any habits like remembering oh it’s time to take my meds oh but I don’t have to anymore and stuff like that. I guess I don’t have to worry about that though… Doc.” She says sarcastically but then she didn’t know if she was really sarcastic about that or not. Maybe that was something to think deeper about some other day. “And Like my mom? You know, I don’t even know where she buried. I don’t even know if she was buried at all.” Mia looked up at the ceiling and fidgeted for a while.
"I think for a long time I wanted to be scared because it was easy to be scared. When you’re scared you don’t ever have to face what you’re afraid of. If you hide you don’t. So that’s what I did. That’s what I’ve been doing since I was like… eleven or twelve. But I’m not afraid anymore. I’m not. I think I’m ready to face my dad…"
She didn’t know at what point things had started disappearing from the room, but they did. And so did she.
Zach looked suspiciously around before he walked through the door but he was immediately thrown off guard when he moved from the large library into a smaller, more ornately decorated, full of things that just screamed whoever owned it spent a lot of money on it. There were tall bookshelves around, and a desk sitting near the wall with a large window. He recognized it as his fathers study, a room he hardly was ever allowed in while growing up. And he recognized his father sitting at the desk, but maybe it wasn’t actually his father.
He walked in and sat down on the plushly cushioned chair across from his father, like he used to when he had gotten in trouble for some reason when he was younger. Which had really been the only reason he was ever left into his study in the first place.
A confession should come easily, something he had never told anyone before? He had tons of those because he never told anyone anything except for maybe Bunny and Zatanna.
"I don’t know why I have any friends. If I were someone else I would hate me."
the beginning of the end
You find yourself in a library, within which are archived an overwhelming number of books, as well as everything else from stone tablets and papyrus scrolls, to CD-ROMs and floppy disks, to flash drives and laptops. You are with eight other people: Mia Dearden, Damian Wayne, Steph Brown, Zatanna Zatara, Zach Zatara, Kate Spencer and Jason Blood
You are in your Batman uniform. Your physical health has been fully restored.
There is an owl and a raven perched on the bower of an open doorway, and they seem to be bickering at each other and ignoring you and your group. Eventually they quiet and still when a figure steps into the room.
He is tall and robed, his face hidden in the shadows of the hood. He carries in one hand a large book and in the other a shepherd’s crook.
"Welcome. You may call me Destiny. First I shall assure you that everyone you care about is safe. Some have been restored to their homes on Earth. I will explain this situation." Destiny goes on to explain.
"Your path homewards is through this door, and you may each go through and speak your confession. Once you go through to the next room, you will be in the realm of the beings. We will not protect you. Fight and you will die. Speak the truth and you will live. Your destiny awaits. You must leave." Destiny points towards the doorway and the owl and raven each sound out their birdcall, which echoes in the great library.
"Now go."
—-
His cloak whispers against the cobblestones as he walks out of the space they had been occupying, and into the night air. There is no sickly sweet shock that filters into his system when he lands in the alleyway. He isn’t sure if there is comfort in that fact, or not, but he doesn’t give himself time to process it and continues to walk.
His boots leave tracks of their crimson, their scarlet in stucco-patterns on the ground as he walks past their bodies, her pearls shining like constellations in the arterial darkness of married blood, away from the light, towards the darkness at the end of the alley, away from the spotlight-streetlight, and into the pitch, the black.
The Cave is cold and empty, the illuminated glass tubes where the uniforms of fallen soldiers are void, hollow, in their memorial behind him. The man tilts his head, cowl shifting at the back of his skull and he exhales, breath clouding the air in front of his mouth as he speaks. There is no tidy preface, because they want truth, and besides that, Bruce has never been one for excess in speech.
"I love them."
The echoes don’t carry the way that they should; he turns his head to the side, seeing the glow of dozens of eyes, staring back at him, waiting for the end of it all to come.
”..and I’m going to leave them.”
—-
Bruce isn’t sure if he’s woken up anywhere, because he is still in the Cave, the coolness of it setting into his bones now, except.. No. He’s in his father’s arm chair in front of the Computer, and dressed in the clothes he had worn the day of the mistake. He looks at the time, the date, on the lower left hand side of the main screen, and calculates his time gone at roughly three hours. Three hours, give or take the minutes that had passed since they’d made contact with Mar’i’s home world back at the HSR, before it had all gone to hell.
In twenty minutes, the sun would be fully set and Friday would be well underway. In twenty minutes, the first weekend evening patrol would begin in Gotham City.
Bruce suits up.
Steph’s palms began to sweat as she took in what Destiny told them. One by one they each slowly began filing through the eery doorway and disappearing, apparently returning home. She gave a little wave to her friends around her and smiled sheepishly, trying to reassure them as she stepped through into the darkness.
When her eyes refocused and the lights turned on, she recognized the room as Dr. Leslie Thompkin’s clinic. Where Batman went when he needed medical expertise that went beyond Alfred. Where she’d “died”just a few years ago. Steph ran a hand along the orderly sick bed, the scratchy, sterile sheets familiar under her fingers. The door on the opposite side of the room opened and she sat down on the edge of the bed, shaking her head to herself. “Long time no see, huh Boyfriend Wonder?” she said, smiling fondly at fourteen year old Tim Drake in his first Robin costume, wearing that boyish face she’d fallen so completely in love with. Laughing just a little awkwardly as she sat on the edge of the stiff bed, Steph pulled back her cowl and looked him in the eyes, something stirring in her check like a car’s engine that hadn’t been started in years, yet somehow all the little cogs and gears sputtered to life and the cobwebs flitted away.
"You know everything about me, you know?" she sighed, pulling the figure that looked like Tim down to sit beside her. He was half a head shorter than she was now, cheeks still swollen with residual baby fat puberty hadn’t gotten to yet. Had they both really been so young when they had dated? She resisted the urge to run her fingers through his ridiculous spiked hair. Instead, she settled for playing with his gloved fingers idly.
"You know more about me than I’ve ever told anyone, maybe even more than I realize. I don’t know what else there is to say." Steph chewed on her lip, working a piece of dead skin between her teeth in deep thought. But only one thing came to mind. She knew that it wasn’t him she was confessing to, but it was still hard. She sighed. "Actually, I think I do … So, you know how we were technically broken up when I’d died?" she asked, expecting him to answer, and snorting softly when he didn’t. "You know now that when I died, I was actually away in Africa with Leslie for a year recuperating. You know that I came back and started fighting crime again without really letting you guys all know I wasn’t really dead. But what you don’t know is that I almost didn’t come back."
Steph paused, her smile turning tender as the Tim-figure sat there staring blandly at her and she leaned her head against his shoulder, making him rest his arm around her waist, letting herself drown in nostalgia, just for a minute. Her eyes closed and she continued softly, “I get why Jason went berserk. When I came back and saw that you’d all moved on after me, it broke my heart and I felt like a ghost. Like, I could have just turned around again and gone anywhere else and started a new life and none of you would have been the wiser … I stayed in Gotham for a couple of nights and sat in my motel room doing nothing but feel kind of numb, nothing really productive, you know? Leslie gave me the means to either start over in a new city or buy back my costume, and it wasn’t until I saw you running through the streets that I decided to come back.”
She could feel herself growing warm, tingly. The room around them was starting to dim and fade away, the weight of Tim’s arm around her growing lighter and lighter. “You were chasing some random purse snatcher and I saw you out my window and, I don’t know, I guess I realized that first, no matter what, I’d never be done crime fighting, no matter how much I lost. And secondly, even though we were probably never going to date or anything again, even if we stopped loving each other, I just wanted to hold your hand and see you smile again. Even just as friends.”
Steph kissed his dissolving cheek softly and whispered, “I’ll always love you somehow, Tim Drake. No matter what.” And then she was home in bed.
As she walked forward the sprawling halls of Shadowcrest sprang forth and ahead of her rested a familiar magic box. It was reminiscent of the one she had sprung from in Cachement, and eerily familiar with one she had gotten trapped in years ago during her father’s tour. Climbing into the box and shutting the trap she fit snugly, not unlike most of her tricks.
Soon her father’s voice, muffled, indistinguishable, but very much so his voice began to speak nearby the box. Zatanna wanted more than anything to fly open the trap and reveal her hiding spot to him, but she knows he’ll disappear and so much worse if she does that.
She remained quiet and still, soaking up his unidentifiable words as he seems to float about the box before she decided to speak after a few passes.
"I’m really selfish, but I think you knew that for a while." she started, her finger tracing against the sanded down wood on the inside of the box, "I wanted you always when I was little, I couldn’t be away from your side- like some shadow sidekick hybrid. And then I couldn’t get away from you. Why’d I ever want to get away from you? God I must’ve been horrible…like Zach or something, ugh. He’s not that bad though, if anything I was maybe worse.
I wanted to run away, and I wanted nothing to do with you and especially mom. I always blame mom…but I never blame myself you know?” she thumps her head against the side of the box and to her surprise her father knocked back lightly, as if to say 'keep going'. “And then you were gone, and it’s like…I wanted you back more than anything but I couldn’t do anything! So I tried to fill your shoes as best as I could manage and for a really long time I’ve been pretty great at it if I do say so myself.” she laughed, tucking her chin against her knees.
"And then I found Clark, and he’s so…god he’s the best thing that never ever came to this planet and somehow he fell for me. He’s so damn good to me, he’s like you. You were and he is still too good to me…even after some of the things I’ve done to him." she sighs, rocking her feet against the small space, "I can’t be perfect like you were, and I can’t be as good as he is. But I can be honest with him. With Kyle, I can be honest with what I want from them and maybe they’ll understand. Or maybe they won’t. But if I’m not open…I just need to be open." It was then she felt the box whirl around and the second trap unlock, dumping her out into her living room in Metropolis.
"Ta-dah." she beamed, straightening herself into a sitting position from where she had spilled out onto the floor.
Your injuries have been fully healed.
There is an owl and a raven perched on the bower of an open doorway, and they seem to be bickering at each other and ignoring you and your group. Eventually they quiet and still when a figure steps into the room.
He is tall and robed, his face hidden in the shadows of the hood. He carries in one hand a large book and in the other a shepherd’s crook.
"Welcome. You may call me Destiny. First I shall assure you that everyone you care about is safe. Some have been restored to their homes on Earth. I will explain this situation." Destiny goes on to explain:
"Your path homewards is through this door, and you may each go through and speak your confession. Once you go through to the next room, you will be in the realm of the beings. We will not protect you. Fight and you will die. Speak the truth and you will live. Your destiny awaits. You must leave.” Destiny points towards the doorway and the owl and raven each sound out their birdcall, which echoes in the great library.
"Now go."
”A confession…” Ollie repeated to himself, but there was no more time for questions or musing. No sooner had he stepped through the door (almost without realizing he was doing it, and with a last panicked thought that he should have looked back first, kissed Mia and Kate and Bruce goodbye, as if he’s descending into the underworld and won’t have the chance to look back again) than the whole scene shifted around him.
There was no arrayed tribunal, no mystical querent, no robed priest there to take this confession.
There was his Uncle Thomas.
"Jesus," Ollie said, with a sound somewhere between a laugh and a choke. "I almost didn’t recognize you."
His uncle regarded him with a look of cold, indifferent distaste, and Ollie pressed his lips together, closing his eyes and nodding. Yeah, that look brought it back. The same look that Thomas had turned on Ollie aged nine, when he was fresh off the private flight from Tanzania and still shaking with the memory of hot screams and blood, still learning the word ‘orphan’. The look that Robert had worn when he packed his nephew off to one boarding school after another, sometimes while Ollie begged and wailed to not be sent away again.
So. With that look. “Okay,” Ollie said. “Yet another round of having to entreat you to let me go home, huh? All right. You got it.
Here’s my confession, then: I didn’t even wanna fucking leave this ant farm you dropped us into.” Ollie took a breath. “After Connor got here, especially. Why would I want to? I had my whole family there with me. But more than that, more than that and as selfish as fucking hell, I had Kate and Bruce with me.”
Ollie shook his head, hands balling into fists. “God, you don’t know how much I wanted to keep everything just like that, the three of us living together and sleeping together and waking up with each other, instead of having to go back to the world, our opposite coasts, logistics and separation and complications. Everything seemed sweet and perfect and easy here, first. And even when it all went horrible. Even now, now at the end, after all the horror everybody’s gone through. I’d still want to stay here just to have them with me, all the time.”
He finished there, a flush creeping up his throat and face, and there was silence. Ollie was just about to shout at the apparition of his uncle, demand a response, when Thomas rose, walked over, and handed Ollie a thin cardboard sleeve.
"What—" Ollie began, and then stopped. He was holding an airplane ticket back to Star City. He looked up again, but his Uncle Thomas was gone.
And then, finally, Ollie was too.
For some reason, a half dozen pop culture references flickered through Kate’s head at once, all of them something just on the tip of her tongue to quote wryly, then vanished just as quickly as they had come (it is your destiny speak friend and enter only the penitent man will pass I’m your density welcome to the afterlife jean-luc you’re dead and I’m god this is the end my dear old friend the end, sweeping away with each step she took and gone by the time she was through the door).
Kate was so very tired of dancing to everyone else’s tune, tired of the shock she got when she saw who was waiting for her, so so tired, almost tired enough to die—but she couldn’t stop her reaction anyway.
"Mama," she said, and sat down on the kitchen chair across from her, the crumbling old apartment kitchen around them, a smell of humid smog and linoleum, old cooking and blood Kate hadn’t realized she’d never forgotten. The woman, her mama, was right but different than she ever remembered her being, or maybe that was because Kate’s memories were in fragments she never wanted to piece back together. So young, a decade younger than Kate herself was now.
Despite her not wanting it to, it worked.
Kate wrapped her gauntleted hands around the mug of cafe de olla that sat in front of her on the table, pondered the cinnamon stick that emerged jauntily from it for a long moment, then said, without looking up, “I want the baby. Ours, all three of ours, like she was. And it’s so stupid, because everything else that comes with it terrifies me. To be pregnant, and every single logistical issue that arises, and because Ollie refuses to let himself think about it, fights it, and Bruce doesn’t talk about anything without a fight. And because I’m selfish, I don’t want to not be able to be Manhunter, and I don’t want all the risks. And—” her voice cracked, “because I didn’t even plan my son, was a shitty mother to him for so long.”
She looked up, at her mama, said in a cold, despairing voice. “How can I betray him like that? Even think about it? But I do. And I have her, at least, in that golden little fantasy world in my head, the blue-sky plan. She is still there and she is ours, and you fuckers had to shit on even that for laughs.”
Her mama gestured to the coffee mug instead of responding, even as Kate felt herself biting her lip, about to dash it against the wall, scream and sob. The gesture was obvious: drink up.
"I don’t want t—”
But the reflex, the muscle memory of her mama’s requests when she was small, made her do it. Cinnamon and sugar and orange and bitter coffee flooded her tongue, her mind, her soul, home—
And Kate Spencer was swept away with it.
She almost feels like someone shoved her through the creepy doorway before she could even look around. Look around at the people with her, and the weird library that kind of reminded her of that one library in A:TLA with that weird owl thing. And she wondered if they were underground or something. Well it didn’t matter.
It definitely didn’t matter because when she went through the doorway the room changed darastically to somewhere you know would never be in a place like this. It was a small room with floresant lighting, a medical bed set up in the middle, cabnets and shelves set up around the room with tons of medical supplies situated around. Of course she knew where she was, she had been to her doctors office so many times it was ridiculous. So, Mia hopped up on the bed, the paper on it crinkling a bit as she got situated. As if on cue her Doctor walked in, though she knew it wasn’t actually her doctor.
"So, a confession…" Mia said trailing off and resting her hands in her lap as she thought swinging her feet back and forth the heels of her boots hitting against the metal of the bed stand. "You know when like… someone asks you what your favorite song is and suddenly you forget every single song you’ve ever listened to? That’s sort of like what this feels like…" She explains and laughs a sort of nervous fake awkward laugh that you usually used in uncomfortable situations, like going to the doctors. Her doctor didn’t even move. "Right…"
What was she supposed to confess? There were so many things…
Mia bit down on her lip and thought. And thought. Making little hm sounds every now and then. She almost thought whatever had taken the form of her Doctor was getting impatient but maybe she was just projecting.
"Ok, it’s just that there are so many things I haven’t told anyone it’s so ridiculous." Mia said and shook her head a bit. "Like I could tell you so many things that would fit this criteria but I’m trying to think of something particularly poingent. Like… some sort of lesson I’ve learned from this whole experiance or I’ll feel like it was a waist of time."
She fell silent for a moment again, before she took a deep breath, “But really I think this whole Cachement thing was good for me. I mean it was horrible but it made me… think about things. Things I hadn’t ever really thought about much because it was easy not to think about them. Like what would I do if I wasn’t HIV positive, nothing. Because… it was weird I still… I don’t know I guess didn’t have time to break out of any habits like remembering oh it’s time to take my meds oh but I don’t have to anymore and stuff like that. I guess I don’t have to worry about that though… Doc.” She says sarcastically but then she didn’t know if she was really sarcastic about that or not. Maybe that was something to think deeper about some other day. “And Like my mom? You know, I don’t even know where she buried. I don’t even know if she was buried at all.” Mia looked up at the ceiling and fidgeted for a while.
"I think for a long time I wanted to be scared because it was easy to be scared. When you’re scared you don’t ever have to face what you’re afraid of. If you hide you don’t. So that’s what I did. That’s what I’ve been doing since I was like… eleven or twelve. But I’m not afraid anymore. I’m not. I think I’m ready to face my dad…"
She didn’t know at what point things had started disappearing from the room, but they did. And so did she.
Zach looked suspiciously around before he walked through the door but he was immediately thrown off guard when he moved from the large library into a smaller, more ornately decorated, full of things that just screamed whoever owned it spent a lot of money on it. There were tall bookshelves around, and a desk sitting near the wall with a large window. He recognized it as his fathers study, a room he hardly was ever allowed in while growing up. And he recognized his father sitting at the desk, but maybe it wasn’t actually his father.
He walked in and sat down on the plushly cushioned chair across from his father, like he used to when he had gotten in trouble for some reason when he was younger. Which had really been the only reason he was ever left into his study in the first place.
A confession should come easily, something he had never told anyone before? He had tons of those because he never told anyone anything except for maybe Bunny and Zatanna.
"I don’t know why I have any friends. If I were someone else I would hate me."
the beginning of the end
You find yourself in a library, within which are archived an overwhelming number of books, as well as everything else from stone tablets and papyrus scrolls, to CD-ROMs and floppy disks, to flash drives and laptops. You are with eight other people: Mia Dearden, Damian Wayne, Steph Brown, Zatanna Zatara, Zach Zatara, Kate Spencer and Jason Blood
You are in your Batman uniform. Your physical health has been fully restored.
There is an owl and a raven perched on the bower of an open doorway, and they seem to be bickering at each other and ignoring you and your group. Eventually they quiet and still when a figure steps into the room.
He is tall and robed, his face hidden in the shadows of the hood. He carries in one hand a large book and in the other a shepherd’s crook.
"Welcome. You may call me Destiny. First I shall assure you that everyone you care about is safe. Some have been restored to their homes on Earth. I will explain this situation." Destiny goes on to explain.
"Your path homewards is through this door, and you may each go through and speak your confession. Once you go through to the next room, you will be in the realm of the beings. We will not protect you. Fight and you will die. Speak the truth and you will live. Your destiny awaits. You must leave." Destiny points towards the doorway and the owl and raven each sound out their birdcall, which echoes in the great library.
"Now go."
—-
His cloak whispers against the cobblestones as he walks out of the space they had been occupying, and into the night air. There is no sickly sweet shock that filters into his system when he lands in the alleyway. He isn’t sure if there is comfort in that fact, or not, but he doesn’t give himself time to process it and continues to walk.
His boots leave tracks of their crimson, their scarlet in stucco-patterns on the ground as he walks past their bodies, her pearls shining like constellations in the arterial darkness of married blood, away from the light, towards the darkness at the end of the alley, away from the spotlight-streetlight, and into the pitch, the black.
The Cave is cold and empty, the illuminated glass tubes where the uniforms of fallen soldiers are void, hollow, in their memorial behind him. The man tilts his head, cowl shifting at the back of his skull and he exhales, breath clouding the air in front of his mouth as he speaks. There is no tidy preface, because they want truth, and besides that, Bruce has never been one for excess in speech.
"I love them."
The echoes don’t carry the way that they should; he turns his head to the side, seeing the glow of dozens of eyes, staring back at him, waiting for the end of it all to come.
”..and I’m going to leave them.”
—-
Bruce isn’t sure if he’s woken up anywhere, because he is still in the Cave, the coolness of it setting into his bones now, except.. No. He’s in his father’s arm chair in front of the Computer, and dressed in the clothes he had worn the day of the mistake. He looks at the time, the date, on the lower left hand side of the main screen, and calculates his time gone at roughly three hours. Three hours, give or take the minutes that had passed since they’d made contact with Mar’i’s home world back at the HSR, before it had all gone to hell.
In twenty minutes, the sun would be fully set and Friday would be well underway. In twenty minutes, the first weekend evening patrol would begin in Gotham City.
Bruce suits up.
Steph’s palms began to sweat as she took in what Destiny told them. One by one they each slowly began filing through the eery doorway and disappearing, apparently returning home. She gave a little wave to her friends around her and smiled sheepishly, trying to reassure them as she stepped through into the darkness.
When her eyes refocused and the lights turned on, she recognized the room as Dr. Leslie Thompkin’s clinic. Where Batman went when he needed medical expertise that went beyond Alfred. Where she’d “died”just a few years ago. Steph ran a hand along the orderly sick bed, the scratchy, sterile sheets familiar under her fingers. The door on the opposite side of the room opened and she sat down on the edge of the bed, shaking her head to herself. “Long time no see, huh Boyfriend Wonder?” she said, smiling fondly at fourteen year old Tim Drake in his first Robin costume, wearing that boyish face she’d fallen so completely in love with. Laughing just a little awkwardly as she sat on the edge of the stiff bed, Steph pulled back her cowl and looked him in the eyes, something stirring in her check like a car’s engine that hadn’t been started in years, yet somehow all the little cogs and gears sputtered to life and the cobwebs flitted away.
"You know everything about me, you know?" she sighed, pulling the figure that looked like Tim down to sit beside her. He was half a head shorter than she was now, cheeks still swollen with residual baby fat puberty hadn’t gotten to yet. Had they both really been so young when they had dated? She resisted the urge to run her fingers through his ridiculous spiked hair. Instead, she settled for playing with his gloved fingers idly.
"You know more about me than I’ve ever told anyone, maybe even more than I realize. I don’t know what else there is to say." Steph chewed on her lip, working a piece of dead skin between her teeth in deep thought. But only one thing came to mind. She knew that it wasn’t him she was confessing to, but it was still hard. She sighed. "Actually, I think I do … So, you know how we were technically broken up when I’d died?" she asked, expecting him to answer, and snorting softly when he didn’t. "You know now that when I died, I was actually away in Africa with Leslie for a year recuperating. You know that I came back and started fighting crime again without really letting you guys all know I wasn’t really dead. But what you don’t know is that I almost didn’t come back."
Steph paused, her smile turning tender as the Tim-figure sat there staring blandly at her and she leaned her head against his shoulder, making him rest his arm around her waist, letting herself drown in nostalgia, just for a minute. Her eyes closed and she continued softly, “I get why Jason went berserk. When I came back and saw that you’d all moved on after me, it broke my heart and I felt like a ghost. Like, I could have just turned around again and gone anywhere else and started a new life and none of you would have been the wiser … I stayed in Gotham for a couple of nights and sat in my motel room doing nothing but feel kind of numb, nothing really productive, you know? Leslie gave me the means to either start over in a new city or buy back my costume, and it wasn’t until I saw you running through the streets that I decided to come back.”
She could feel herself growing warm, tingly. The room around them was starting to dim and fade away, the weight of Tim’s arm around her growing lighter and lighter. “You were chasing some random purse snatcher and I saw you out my window and, I don’t know, I guess I realized that first, no matter what, I’d never be done crime fighting, no matter how much I lost. And secondly, even though we were probably never going to date or anything again, even if we stopped loving each other, I just wanted to hold your hand and see you smile again. Even just as friends.”
Steph kissed his dissolving cheek softly and whispered, “I’ll always love you somehow, Tim Drake. No matter what.” And then she was home in bed.
As she walked forward the sprawling halls of Shadowcrest sprang forth and ahead of her rested a familiar magic box. It was reminiscent of the one she had sprung from in Cachement, and eerily familiar with one she had gotten trapped in years ago during her father’s tour. Climbing into the box and shutting the trap she fit snugly, not unlike most of her tricks.
Soon her father’s voice, muffled, indistinguishable, but very much so his voice began to speak nearby the box. Zatanna wanted more than anything to fly open the trap and reveal her hiding spot to him, but she knows he’ll disappear and so much worse if she does that.
She remained quiet and still, soaking up his unidentifiable words as he seems to float about the box before she decided to speak after a few passes.
"I’m really selfish, but I think you knew that for a while." she started, her finger tracing against the sanded down wood on the inside of the box, "I wanted you always when I was little, I couldn’t be away from your side- like some shadow sidekick hybrid. And then I couldn’t get away from you. Why’d I ever want to get away from you? God I must’ve been horrible…like Zach or something, ugh. He’s not that bad though, if anything I was maybe worse.
I wanted to run away, and I wanted nothing to do with you and especially mom. I always blame mom…but I never blame myself you know?” she thumps her head against the side of the box and to her surprise her father knocked back lightly, as if to say 'keep going'. “And then you were gone, and it’s like…I wanted you back more than anything but I couldn’t do anything! So I tried to fill your shoes as best as I could manage and for a really long time I’ve been pretty great at it if I do say so myself.” she laughed, tucking her chin against her knees.
"And then I found Clark, and he’s so…god he’s the best thing that never ever came to this planet and somehow he fell for me. He’s so damn good to me, he’s like you. You were and he is still too good to me…even after some of the things I’ve done to him." she sighs, rocking her feet against the small space, "I can’t be perfect like you were, and I can’t be as good as he is. But I can be honest with him. With Kyle, I can be honest with what I want from them and maybe they’ll understand. Or maybe they won’t. But if I’m not open…I just need to be open." It was then she felt the box whirl around and the second trap unlock, dumping her out into her living room in Metropolis.
"Ta-dah." she beamed, straightening herself into a sitting position from where she had spilled out onto the floor.