shattershine and pools of truth

[bossymarmalade]

The infant Black Mercy instantly begins secretion once it is left alone in the Arboretum containment unit.

Its mother has informed it of the great need — of its noble sacrifice.

The current all-mother is not the first, for like a hive of bees, there is a queen who must eventually pass, as all things do.

Regardless of generation, memory is absorbed into the roots of each Black Mercy from seed to sapling. The memory of light, the memory of dark, the memory of the imbalance a once-proud Mother had tried to correct.

But sometimes the best, the fastest, solutions were not the most beautiful.

The firstborn of the first all-mother — its aunt-uncle by all means — is already inside their minds, hardening and brightening and reflecting all things seemingly good and bright. And yet, all the while, it is only a two-way mirror. The reflection is bright and magnificent, but behind many things lurk and pass, all of them white shadows bearing horrors and loss.

In a few hours, the boy-child will latch the infant onto himself and use its latent abilities to unleash his own inner fears. But for now, the Black Mercy secretes.

The black goo is viscous and clings to anything and everything as it sinks to the bottom of the thin layer of soil. It attempts, for the millionth time of its kind, to form something that looks trustworthy, looks safe, to no avail. It cannot form the mouth it needs to explain, nor the hands it needs to show.

And so the dark liquid waits until the boy-child breaks open the glass in his hysteria, and it slips out, unseen. Liquids expand to fill their containers, and so it multiplies and ripples, dividing itself evenly for all those recent lights burning bright. Around it, the glittering flicker of crystals tinkle and shine. It is very nearly too late for them all.

The liquid seeks out those new Lantern lights — there is no time to warn others, no time for pleasantries.

The liquid must stop it all now, and show them the truth.

As a Lantern, you have remained off-planet to fight. You cannot return to Earth until this duty is done. You want to hopefully – compassionately – lovingly – angrily – willfully - frightfully - defeat the evil darkness that threatens to completely destroy your home.

But is all evil truly dark?

Wherever you are at the time – in outer space, in the Watchtower, seeking the rogue Yellow Lantern Damian – a blackness that you did not trust and did not understand has seeped into your deeper consciousness. The blackness physically forces itself inside your body. You now fight a battle on two planes; and it is the fight within that will affect the battle to save your home, your universe.

This blackness is not evil. It is an unformed balm, sent forth too hastily by Mother Mercy to return balance. It is not designed to hurt, but to heal. And with your newfound Lantern abilities, it has found the right soil to take root.

---

At fifteen Kyle lost his faith. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to obey God, it was that he didn’t want to obey his mother. At twenty, he lost his innocence - in the form of a note that wasn’t in Alex’s handwriting that led to her body, twisted and crammed into a thing it had no business being in. At twenty-five he lost his beliefs, possessed by a being that fed on fear and terror and emotional corruption. He nearly died. He’d been a lot of nearly-situations, like every other hero. But nearlys can change a person.

For Kyle, he nearly lost hope.

Because as a Green Lantern, it wasn’t just about will. Kyle had to believe.

For all the things ruined in his life, there were also the things that elevated it higher than he’d ever imagined. Kyle had a counterbalance. And maybe it was tenuous, maybe it was interdependent - but it was his. His willpower was rooted to his life, and the people he loved. Black liquid spilled from his mouth in a long sinuous sigh, as Kyle layered his will along the emotional spectrum.



RED (Asking Kate about herself doesn’t guarantee an answer. She shares like a ketchup bottle. Kate has anger, and Kyle knows she’s learning how to let it out. He’s also learning from her anger, because what she allows Kyle to see, it’s righteous. It’s about injustice in the world - in their world. A world that Kyle often forgets.) and then—

ORANGE (Look, sometimes you gotta indulge. Whether it’s flying in the middle of the night across hundreds of miles for the perfect taco, or spending an entire day just for himself with his sketchbook and pencils, Kyle knows how to make himself feel like he’s part of the human race, and like he’s part of nothing and everything.) and then—

YELLOW (It isn’t that Kyle fears Damian. It was that Kyle feared what could possibly become of Damian, if he makes choices that lead him down dark paths. He’is just a boy. A small, scared, needful boy skating a very thin line. One slip, one bend or break in his goodness could plunge him into depths Kyle fears he won’t survive. It’s terrifying.) and then—

GREEN (No matter what happens or how badly tarnished the Green Lantern Corps gets in the opinions of the universe it protects, Kyle will never turn his back on his Corps. Ever.) and then—



BLUE (There is nothing like feeling the hope Steph gave Kyle, when he’s feeling down. Her cheer and spirit is unsurpassed. Despite everything she’d been through, all of the trials and rejections her life dealt her, she came out on top. And her positivity is unabashedly open source. The word ‘inspirational’ is too trivial a term to describe how Kyle saw Steph.) and then—

INDIGO (Zatanna brought Kyle back into reality, and hell yeah it took a lot of kicking and screaming on both their parts. But somehow they found each other, tentative steps and sudden crashing and they made it work. It’s a good reality, comforting and secure. Zee works magic on him, sometimes like a soothing balm, other times like a burn. But she always treats him with compassion, no matter what his mood.) and then—

VIOLET (The two Graysons have so much love to give, it seems. It isn’t hard for anyone to see how much love Mar’i has for Roy, Lian and Poppy. For her plants, for her friends and family from another ‘verse, for others here. It’s as beautiful as Dick’s love of humanity; and yet Kyle often wonders if Dick also loves himself as well.) and then—

AND THEN (The inclusion of all the colors created tones, not colors. Dark or light, it doesn’t matter. That Roy is not deputized as any Lantern, it means a lot to Kyle. For many reasons.)



Restoring his balance within, the child of mercy brings balance to the ‘verse.

---

For a moment when it happens, Ollie’s certain that Nekron has made it into the fight, somehow, and that the black goo slinging itself in viscous lashes up his body, in through his orifices, is the Black Lantern power reclaiming him.

And perhaps in the most basic of ways, he’s correct in assuming that the black substance means death; in the way of dreaming, of memory, of orgasm, of time.

Because once it’s inside him and sinking through the fibres of his muscles and corpuscles of his blood, Ollie isn’t on the Watchtower arboretum anymore. Sweat drenches him instantly, sticking his shirt to his skin and making him gasp for breath under the pressure of humidity as the sun piledrives down. He’s back in Rungwa, of course he is.

1.


The Mercy sap inside him throbs in time with his pulse and the beating of the sun, a surge of it glugging with each rivulet of dark blood streaming from his mother’s opened throat and his father’s shredded torso. “This was long ago,” Ollie says aloud into the stifling air. He adds a thought that he’d had then but never been able to articulate. “Their blood’s going frozen.” Thick and sluggish even in the heat. His head swims and Ollie does his best to shut out the black flies that undulate onto the bodies, claiming his parents for their own children.

He knows what this is about. The sap is showing him one of the most hopeless moments of his life, the last time that as a child he’d be with adults who cared for him, loved him, showed affection. All of that is draining away into the dirt, food for worms and vultures. “I got through it, though,” Ollie says quietly as he watches ants form lacework around the edges of the blood to drink it up, and he laughs, suddenly, loud enough to make the flies rise up before settling again. “I’m the fucking boy who lived. All of us are.”

And that is truth, written in Mia’s scribbled secrets against the inside of her closet, hidden in a house yellow as sunflowers to conceal its sickness. In the rhythm tattooed inside Roy’s skin so indelibly that neither fire nor chemical could eradicate it. In the voice righteous and strong that Kate has fashioned from the screaming and knives that carved her out of childhood. In pearls and oaths and darkness turned into Bruce’s cloak and weapon where once that darkness signified the end of all things holy.

They all lived, when they could just as easily have died. The truth of it is inscribed with peacock-blue imprints of hope, held close and shimmering to light the way forward.

So he goes, forward.

2.

WHO in the whole fucking benighted world gets the CHANCE the great big stinkin’ swellin’ OPPORTUNITY to freakin’ kick the bucket, adios, purchase a farm, and then come back to see how the world took this awful news? Yeah not a lot of people ‘cept YOURS TRULY and lo and behold when I got back from goddamn un-Fantasy Island there was a GOOSE EGG waiting for me when it came to anybody who’d given even the measliest of shits.

(all right no that’s not the whole truth ‘cause there was abby, jehovah and jewish saints bless her forever and into perpetuity for actually being sad that i’d shuffled off the mortal coil but it’s the principle of the thing)

BUT.

But. There’s this gang of folks who call themselves the Justice League and … I dunno. They have a purpose I think I could get behind. Yeah, me, the champagne anarchist. It’s a laugh, right? ButbutBUT.

I worked with them a couple of times and actually felt a sense of ACCOMPLISHMENT which is nothing to sneer at when you’re as fucking USELESS as I am, bred for parties and binge drinking and screwing and not so much anything SUBSTANTIAL or MEANINGFUL.

Still.

We took down some kind of flying space krill today and that HOT dark-haired girl, the one who looks all the time like she’s got fucking STARS in her hair and eyes so BLUE they could drown you, she smiled at me and said, “Nothing we can’t handle, right Green Arrow?” and I felt like I BELONGED. To them. To her. To a TEAM. Like it was a foregone conclusion, a living TRUTH.

Zatanna, that’s her name. Zatanna. I need to learn their names if I’m gonna be part of something. If I’m not gonna be alone anymore. If I’m gonna TAKE this chance I’ve been given to hopefully do good in this world, alongside friends.

3.

It’s gotten him this far, has the blue light of hope, arching cerulean and azure and electric through the garden of his history. And it’s true, it’s nothing without green willpower to give it legs, but Ollie’s tenacity and need have driven him through death and loss and pain to the other side, where the blue waits, soft and indestructible. Forever there no matter how adversity and suffering have driven it back and down, waiting for Ollie to grasp it again.

Hope has always been his weapon.

With a gasp, Ollie lets that blue seep out of his blood vessels and ligaments, the spaces that cradle his organs, his viscera and bone marrow; he floats up above the trees in the arboretum as blue light melts through the black Mercy sap and it drips down his body, falling from his toes. It coalesces, dark black-blue like his lovers’ hair, and it’s not death anymore. It’s the blackness of infinite possibility, containing all and nothing, and as his own blue sinks back into the beating core of him the black knots and twists itself in the air until it explodes.

Not gone, even with the intangible flakes of silvery-black-blue that rain down around Ollie as his feet settle on solid ground once more. The darkness, like his hope, can never be entirely gone. It has expanded outward past the need for its tangible state and is now returning to the universe, adding itself to the cosmic balance to restore harmony.

It is truth, and it is hope. And he’s done his part.

---

Zee pulls at the slick black substance that clings to her skin, her fingertips trying in vain to pull it before it does any damage. It all sinks into her skin faster than she can say a word to put a stop to.

Her hand brushes against Kyle, her lips begin to form the spell, and she watches his eyes growing wide with realization as her own form her tears with just the same.

It’s not till Kyle flickers to that glinting smile that isn’t his that Zee’s even at all concerned by what’s happening around her. The black mercy inside her throttling faster along side her quickening pulse. No she pleads with her body but her hand is still moving, horrifically slow. Her nails scrape against his jawline, and she can feel the unsavory sapping, drawing up into her hand, leaving her free hand to curve against his neck.

With her hands in place she can finally hear the spell she’s cast, “Niard.” her voice just as angry and vicious as it had been the day she’d wanted to expel the demon from him, leaving a very different black now viciously draining from every single one of his pores.

The curve of her lip turns with a pleased smile watching the blackened pool forming in front of Kyle, as Zee’s stuck helpless in her own body to watch knowing what came next was the red.

Red like Ramsey, and Kate, and the pounding of her heart heard in her ears. She was still fuming at this leech still and for all it managed to drive her to. Kyle’s mangled voice- his voice, reaches out to her, “Stop.”

Ribbons of blood swirl in the onyx pool just as striking as it had been before, but it’s at this moment her heart lurches from it’s drumbeat. She lunges to Kyle, now on all fours, her hands covering over his nose and mouth. You know the words, make it stop her brain cooly reminds her, but her whole body’s shaking when the alternative rises.

"If I let it all go now, then he won’t have to lose him anymore. No one has to be lost." but she can’t have it, Kyle’s paling skin and the blood seeping between her fingers only reaffirming that. "I’ll make it right." she promises, despite the quietly odd reminder that it had all been fixed without her. "I’ll fix it. I’ll fix this.”

The ribbons of blood snake around them crisscross upon the floor as Kyle’s color returns, as the drain cast upon him has now halted for good. She pulls Kyle against her, arms wrapping against his back as the red lines that tangle them turn the same indigo she’d been stretching since she’d borrowed that ring.

Zee’s pressed against the window in the hall when the indigo tendrils curve for her one last time into the Black Mercy sap. The tangled goo beading down the pane out like marbled ink that slowly loses form with every inch it falls.

While the indigo around her fades, nothing inside her is left to stop the insatiable urge to keep things tied together, to mend the breaks, and ease into fixing.

---

Kate Spencer was a weapon. Preventative measures, shooting off red light grenades and tracer rounds and Mythbusters-caliber explosives at incoming forces. She could feel their hate, almost, it resonating in her and tossing up righteous rage (why hate, you fucking fools, when there’s so much fucking universe to understand first).

It was buying time, her mission—keep shit back from the Watchtower as long as she could, forget what was going on there, the danger and the trouble and the fear—and it felt really good, this buying time. Smacking sense into the haters of the universe.

Which was why she barely noticed the initial sap-like merge of black goo into muscle and sinew, until it was too late and she found herself calmer than she’d been in days. A bit terrifying, that feeling of clarity, and so Kate tampered down the panic, tried to tap back into ANGRY—

And as she did, she was thrown back into a very different place indeed.

Kate hadn’t seen the world from this perspective in a very long time, sitting and kicking her legs against a dining room chair. The Wolff house, so vivid she could smell it: her new foster parents, the big bads, a couple, in their forties, who seemed amazingly old, to Katie Vargas.

Bob and Debbie, an office drone and his housewife spouse, who’d quit the same office when they got married. Foster lifers, they’d had loads of kids, her social worker said, no complaints. There’d be a sister for her there already, they’d just taken her on too, the same age, even. Eight.

Jessica Reed’s parents had had a lucrative side business in their basement, which the cops had noticed when it started sucking power off the grid. Maybe it wouldn’t have been so bad, but this was a summer that was so hot that dogs and babies died in cars, old people expired right and left when their AC went out in brownouts, people’s shoes melted a little as they walked across blacktop. Not much sympathy for those with growlights, tending their little crop. Not at all.

It was Jessica’s first foster home, and she was everything that Katie was not. Katie was quiet, read books above her age level in a quiet corner by the air conditioning vent with a popsicle. Jessica was nice enough, sure, but she was a little blonde girl with big eyes, who liked ponies and sparkles, who prattled on about Rainbow Brite. Little Katie Vargas was on foster home number four by now, and precocious to boot.

It didn’t take her long to realize there was something not quite right.

Kate knew exactly how this story went. Bob Wolff, the big bad, liked blondes, and Jessica Reed hadn’t realized yet that she was in this for the long haul. A long haul which would end her up in a LA County courtroom, arraigned for murder over a hundred bucks for another hit, a file on the desk of ADA Kate Spencer’s boss.

This was where it started. Because Bob wanted to go watch TV with Jessica, this first time. And Katie, knowing deep in her bones not to make waves, not to be loud, and never ever to let them notice you, would stay there by the vent, sucking a cherry store-brand Fla-Vor-Ice until it turned her mouth bright red. Debbie in the kitchen would ignore, enable, the weeping at night, the excuses, the lies. And none of them would ever, ever tell.

No, thought Kate, and the rage came flooding back, almost blinding her, tasting of cheery cherry and burning cold against her tongue.

In the moment Jessica, sensing something vaguely off, hesitated, Katie launched herself off the chair, slamming her book to the floor and the chair over backwards into the wall. “I NEVER GET TO WATCH SHE-RA,” she shrieked at the top of her lungs, pummeling her fists at Bob’s thighs before flopping down on the floor and screaming (perhaps this Kate was more than a little influenced by a certain Miss Harper who had not yet been born). “WHY DO I NEVER GET TO WATCH SHE-RA?! I WANT TO WATCH SHE-RA—ALL THE OTHER KIDS WATCH IT! IT’S NOT FAIIIIIIR.”

Part of Kate watched herself throw the tantrum, even as part of her reveled in throwing it. It was hard to say, what outcome that would have in the long run—perhaps nothing. If Bob would hit her, if she would be sent away, if she would tell. If But she had done something, broken the cycle, at least in one small way.

and the rage filtered through her, out of her, even as the goo almost-painlessly seeped out of her and there was will and hope and love and compassion and fear and everything else a part of the answer

Everything, she saw, had been horribly wrong, like a fever dream that was now broken—and the contrast was so overwhelming that Kate Spencer Queen passed out, floating in a faint mist of red, drifting in near-Earth orbit.

---

Damian is back and healing and safe, and if the battle in space hadn’t been enough to tire Dick out, the waiting for Damian to recover certainly had. But he is fine now. He doesn’t need Dick hovering over him all day and night, and Dick needs rest. So, of course, Dick goes to try and clean up what was left of the case that held the Black Mercy. Mindless cleaning and solid sleep are pretty much the same thing, after all.

Dick sits on the floor in front of a small pile of glass he’s scooped together with his boots. The solid construct uniform had protected him in space, so it stands to reason that the gloves could protect him from a few shards of glass. They should be enough to protect him just about anything. It is this sureness that keeps him oblivious of the familiar inky black until it was deep enough inside him to be noticed. He gasps in shock, his fingers slipping along the edge of a shard. Blood drips from his finger, mingling with a trail of black that navigates its way up into the wound.

It’s not the first time he’s had blood on his hands. So much blood.

He’s back on the rooftop. The rain is doing nothing to wash away the blood and gore from Blockbuster’s brain, god he was in splatter distance— and all he knows is that he failed.

He’s failed Bruce. He failed his family. He failed his parents and he’d had their blood on him too, just like this—

He knows this place too well, because he still sees it every day, in every dream, in every nightmare, in Hell.

"Don’t talk to yourself, querido, talk to me…"

"I failed you," he’d said, he says again. "Utterly. Catalina, I’m so, so sorr—"

Then she’s touching him. She’s straddling him. She’s taking down her hair. Not short and bouncy like Barbara’s. Not heavy and overflowing like Kori’s. No, it’s dark and sleek like Mirage’s.

Mirage.

"Dick, you slut!"

That’s what Pantha had said. That’s what she’d said right before she asked who was better, as if this was some sort of pre-existing arrangement, some sort of swinging between him and whatever other Titan wanted to cross Kori. They had all brushed that off; it’s just good ol’ loose Dick. Kori wouldn’t speak to him; he must have known it wasn’t her, after all.

"It’s the butt!"

"No, no, it’s all about his eyes."

"Something about that chest!"

"Could that butt look any better in those tights?"

It’s all together, but it’s not. It’s in the little things that remind him he’s never gotten over this, he’s never getting over it. Because even after everything, buried somewhere deep down there’s that other layer, that deeper trigger that never fails to send him over the edge, even though he’s been forgiven:

He still let Blockbuster die.

She’s pushing him down, but it’s not like the first time, when he was alone and trapped in his own mind. It’s not like the last time, when Bruce broke the illusion, made her go away even in Hell. It’s all different, but it’s all the same, but he’s seeing it all and he’s connecting it all and he knows and he’s frightened but he’s…

"Bruce loves me."

He says it aloud and the weight of it, the truth of it, hits him like a truck.

Whatever Bruce had felt about Blockbuster’s death, he had made it clear it was nothing compared to what he felt about Dick’s self-destruction. Until Dick forgave himself, forgiveness wouldn’t feel worth it. And it hadn’t.

But now it did.

"My friends love me."

He knows they did, knows they always have. Kori forgave him. Ollie understands, maybe better than anyone else. Even if the others don’t or never will, they still love him just as much as he loves each one of them.

But he loses it. He loses sight of so much when he gets like this, when he sees her, and feels her again. Everything he’s worked to be, everyone he’s wants to be strong for, it all gets lost because…

Because…

Dick opens his eyes and looks at her, touches her, and she’s no longer heavy-emphasis, mental-italics her, she’s just Tarantula. Catalina Flores.

"Murderer," he says. "Rapist."

It’s the first time he’s said it aloud for himself. He’s not hiding it with unfinished sentences and trailed off words, with general gestures and apologetic shrugs so someone else can fill in the blanks.

"Both of you," he says again, and Mirage is there beside her, beside him, flickering in and out of Kori’s appearance.

"I don’t forgive you," he says, and his chest glows, slowly heating as if he’s swallowed a smouldering lump of coal.

"I’ll never forgive you," he says, and the glow gets brighter and the warmth grows and now neither of them are touching him.

"But I won’t let you hurt me anymore."

The very air goes violet, surrounding them with a pulsing light.

"You hurt me so I couldn’t," he says, "but I love myself again. You have no power over me."

Mirage and Tarantula flicker. Behind them, the bloodied Blockbuster rises, changing between himself in life, his corpse, his reanimated Black Lantern self.

"I forgive myself for what happened to you," he says, as the women grow fainter, his focus solely on Blockbuster. "But you were going to hurt the ones I love. You were using my love against me."

The pulsing intensifies to an almost unbearable pressure. When he speaks, the violet speaks with him.

"If it ever happened again, I’ll kill you myself."

The light shatters like a crystal, Mirage, Tarantula, and Blockbuster shattering with it. The pain, the despair, the hatred is gone, replaced by love and a violence the likes of which Dick has never felt before. It’s fire and ice and so much love he could kill with it and—

"Grayson?"

A shudder runs through him.

"Dick?"

His whole body convulses.

"Robin?"

He shatters and when he opens his eyes, he’s hunched over the broken glass, and that’s how he feels before he notices the cut on his finger. The black is oozing back out, taking flight once it leaves his body to go and fix what needs to be fixed. It takes that love— that violent love— and goes.

He’s just Dick Grayson now. There’s a strange emptiness inside of him and it takes him a long while to realize that it’s not emptiness, it’s calmness. There’s so much he feels now that he no longer feels the things that set him on edge every moment. He knows.

"I love myself," he says to the broken glass on the ground. There’s no catastrophic disaster, no terrible memory, no response from anything. Dick nods and sucks the blood from his fingertip. It’s a simple statement, but it feels strange on his tongue, as if it doesn’t belong there.

For once, however, he can’t seem to find a reason why it shouldn’t.

---

It is easy to remember the first burn of rage, the first sour-sting of fear. It is less easy to remember the first time you offered someone something out of compassion, the first time you felt hope for the future. Your first big accomplishments follow your first will, and your first greed always surfaces in those earliest years, when all is yours and not-yours because you are still too young, far too young, to know the difference.

But love is impermeable and all-encompassing, and to find the end you must find the beginning, the most from the first, the least from the last.
A mother curves her fingers around the growing mound of her belly, and the child inside loves the sound of the voice drifting through the warm life-waters.

The newborn loves her father’s face when it comes into her field of vision, all moon-eyes and pin-prick dimples.

The toddler bobs up and down for her grandfather’s attention, hair bouncing in thick, voluminous curls. When he turns, she smiles.

The child loves her room with the night sky hand-painted on the ceiling and the treehouse her uncle gives her and all her toys and clothes and the neighbor with the funny laugh and the teacher with the messy chignon.

The teenager loves herself into heartbreak when her parents’ love runs dry.

The young woman loves the young boy who smiles at her, the one who holds her hand, the one that kisses her cheek and the one that shows her what bodies feel like tangled up in each other.

And then there is flowing emerald and crisp gold.

And then there is nothing.

The woman relives all these loves as the liquid boils inside her, and dreams of cycles and circles. Each time, she will choose love, chooses love, chose love. There is no other option for her.

The goddess passes before her in the darkness, then, cloaked in gold-and-blood glory, half-masked by the tresses of golden strands that sprout from her head.

"Do you love me, child?”

"Yes, X’Hal."

"Will you always love me, child?”

"Yes, Queen 바지."

"Will your children love me, child?”

Mar’i swallows and nods. ”Yes, Changing Woman.”

The goddess’ fingertips alight onto the dark liquid, and it goes razor-clear, revealing the iridescent surface underneath.

Mar’i is twelve, and her parents are arguing. She is slamming the bedroom door again and again. They are angry. She is angry. She slams the door once, twice, threefourfivesix times, and then she parts her lips, dual little plum-slices not yet ripe.

She knows what she says next. I hate you. I hate you both.

She inhales, chest rising, and the liquid shivers.

I love you. I love you both.

And another crack appears as the young girl becomes a young woman becomes a grown woman.

The grown woman coughs up a mouthful of truth and stares up at the cracked sky.

---

When the time comes for Roy to be deputized, he waits. Sure, he liked space about as much as horses liked fire, but Lian had gone, so had Mar’i—and watching the glorious transformations of both, Roy rubs his hand over his sternum and feels the knobbly patches of scar tissue where bullet fragment still reside in his skin.
He busies himself with fixing things, finding hex keys and adjustable wrenches and tightening things in the Watchtower galleys, the tables in their bedrooms, the hinges on the doors in the apartment in Star.

He cleans out the fridge, the microwave, and stops to look at himself in the distorted outside of the stainless steel fridge.

He goes to sleep on a cot in the Med Bay, because Lian and the rest of them are still too supercharged with emotion, the color spectrum alight across the darkness of space outside of them, and finds himself feeling like a kid again. He thinks, think thinks, about what color he’s gonna be when he wakes up.

He thinks that blue seems most likely, especially with how quick it had happened with Ollie (and they were more alike than either cared to admit at any given hour) and if not blue, then Green. He thinks he’d like green more, to be able to talk to Kyle about it, connect. Understand.

He falls asleep thinking about Kyle grinning at him, St. Patrick’s day green brightening the ridges under his eyebrows, and dreams a dreamless sleep.

He wakes up the next day, and nothing happens. He falls asleep, dreaming of Ollie’s green eyes bright as oceans and wakes up an hour before he’s used to and.. Nothing.

The third day his dreams are tinged yellow, sickly with fear as Damian darts through space, a comet tail of newly-minted Lanterns trailing after him, hot on his heels.

She comes to him on the fourth, pulsing violet and indigo and every shade in between, calming him and his jaundiced visions away.

Roy’s dreams filter through a prism, all shades bright under the drapes of his eyelids, and wakes to a world without color.

---

The darkness almost doesn’t recognize him. In his peripheral senses he can feel the way the black spreads, the sound around him in space—which is /not/ silent, surprisingly enough: Bruce can hear the waves of solar radiation penetrating the vacuum, even out here, where he is—suddenly suffocated. His vainglorious attempt to surpass the bubbling in his ears, by sheer will alone, is instantly met with resistance, and that was when he realized what was waiting for him, beyond the verdant shield that enveloped him. The darkness was different, but it was the Darkness, nonetheless, and Bruce inhaled once before the sheath of it enveloped him once again, soft and safe in the security it provided. Bruce knew this, it knew him.

Bruce was aware of all the ways that this, the color black was maligned, how much he had done to propagate the idea of the inherent wickedness of it: creeping up on the unaware, the violent criminals he pursued in Gotham, the world over, and now, through a twist of fate, through space. The black had evolved, as Bruce had, and his own misunderstanding of what it had meant when he had chosen the bat to be his mantle, his sword and shield, why he cloaked himself in swathes of black, had shifted. Beyond just the fear, the realm of death and nothingness, he’d come to understand that more than what comes for us after, what comes for us in the darkest part of the morning, under beds and inside closets— the darkness, the black, is what was before. It was the inevitable outcome, for every creature that drew a first moment of consciousness, that came from darkness, to return to darkness.

So, when he felt the shivering, rippling collision of the Black Mercy against his ankles, now swathed in green, Bruce did not fight it, did not jerk away. He looked ahead, where Damian had gone and let the seeping ooze climb up the tendons, under his knees, lacing up his inner thigh, wrapping around to clamber up his spine like a too-excited child, before it bracketed his neck, jaw, scalp, and climbed in through his open mouth and ears and swallowed him.

Swallowed him whole.

—-

“Alfred!” It was a chirp, bright like the snap of green wood under flame, that bounced out from under the eaves of the bed frame. He paused, and then called again: “Alfred!”

Clambering out from under the bed, Bruce dusted himself off from hands to elbows to knees. The knobby plates were rubbed raw under his slacks, the dark olive faded in places he had mashed the color out with pressure against tree bark and the unsealed stones on what would be the veranda his father was building. He’d spent days out there when the crews had brought the stones in from the coast, Alfred holding an umbrella as he surveilled where Bruce made himself Arthur, the massive washed-white stones his Camelot, and defended his knights against the impervious grip of the evil witch, her flowing dark hair and wicked ways. Today, though, it was Hide and Seek, with Bruce hiding and Alfred.. Well. Alfred was not seeking.

“Alfred, where are you!” He called again, and teeter-tottered his way down the hall, singing. “Alfred, Alfred, sugary pie, kissed the girls—“ And he broke into giggles here, unable to fathom the idea of Alfred kissing any girl. He walked down the long corridors of the Manor, his fingers trailing against the darkened wood, before he stopped at the end of the hallway before the foyer, the tips lingering when he saw what he did, and stopped.

Alfred standing stock-still. Alfred, reading something from a piece of paper so thin that the light slid through the material and down, and Bruce could make out words, skittered across the paper in a leaky telegram typeset. Alfred, with his father’s hand curled around his shoulder, in front of the open door and beyond them both, a man, a stranger, dressed in a courier’s outfit, standing near-expectantly.

Bruce’s father, as Bruce watched, reached into his back pocket, procured a note from his billfold and handed it to the young courier (viridescent joy, at the size of it) before he disappeared, back to his vehicle, steps spry. The door did not close, with Thomas’ hand never leaving Alfred’s shoulder, and Bruce’s father spoke in a quiet, steady tone the boy recognized from his time at the hospital. When there was bad news.

“We can make arrangements for you, Alfred, and I will gladly go with you..” He stated, quietly. Alfred, in front of him, had not stopped reading the paper, was squinting like he couldn’t make out what was on it. On impulse, Bruce stepped forward, and up to Alfred, tugging at his arm.

“Alfred, do you need help?” Bruce asked, and his voice, clarion-bright and pure, twinkled up. He rubbed the man’s arm, like the butler did when Bruce, himself, was upset. He watched— hyper-focused— the way the no-nonsense black material wrinkled stiffly under his fingers. He turned his gaze up to the man’s expression, smiling hopefully at him, and licked his lips. “We can read it together in the drawing room, you can make us tea and we—”

“Bruce,” his father began in reprimand, the deep rasp making the boy’s spine stiffen at the sound, and he looked up when he felt Alfred’s hand flutter, latch onto the back of his neck, stilling him. When Thomas looked over at Alfred, Bruce did, too, and saw the brightness of tears in the man’s eyes. Not fallen, not drifting over lashes the color of a strawberry sunset, but steady, shimmering, as Alfred looked down at the boy, his Bruce, the hazel shattered above a smile. And beyond the shifting kaleidoscope of colors, spring green, slivers of it attempting to break through, in the light still streaming in from the open door.

Standing in the foyer with his father, and Alfred, Bruce felt the foreboding darkness he did not fully comprehend.

—

He knew he should have stopped crying when he realized she was dead. The footsteps were still receding down the alley, and he didn’t hear any sirens, but the gurgling in their throats had stopped and now they were just still, quiet. Her dress had patch on it, at the hip, where Bruce’s thumb had worn it smooth. His father had insisted she buy a new one, but Bruce knew she wore it for him, the dark green that was nearly turquoise, so that if he needed to, his little fingers could find that handhold, know she was there in the crowded theatre.

He saw it in the lamplight, where the hem of her skirt had hiked up, up too far, when she had twisted, fallen and they lay thrashing in her death throes. Bruce, when he is older, will paint their deaths as a single strike, an instant blow, because his mind will have constructed an armory around this night, this blood-stained shroud, but now, at seven, he knows that they didn’t die instantly. That Martha attempted to speak, blood traveling up her windpipe and splattering across the plush curve of her lips, her hand closing and opening against the cobblestone like she held her heart in it, beating slow and still. Her dress was twisted, her legs and arms akimbo, and Bruce felt a curious shame curve into his belly like a lance at the sight of her stockinged-leg, the dark run in it, band clipped at the thigh.

He sobbed, sharply, suddenly, and brought his hand, curled like an infant’s fist to the edge of the material and tugged.

Nothing.

“Mama, I can’t.." He began, and waited for his father to curb his whining, and pulled his hand away, to scrub at his face, wailing. "Mama, I can’t—”

Small fingers that would have only known the kiss of ivory, ermine and nitrile, curled into her dress. Bruce tugged. Tugged again. Tugged until he was grunting through his tears, and she began to shift. Tugged until the material unfurled from around her waist, tugged until her body turned and she was covered once again, modesty saved, flat on her back. Her arm was extended out, and Bruce turned himself in, nudging his cheek between her curled and stiffening fingers to rest his head against the cooling flesh of her palm.

Silently, he took hold of the spot at the hip of her dress, closer to him now, and ran his thumb over the material until he was sure it was the color of that green—that made her eyes dance like springtime renewed, that made Bruce taste apple seeds and peach skins on his tongue, that looked like the sadness in Alfred’s eyes that day— that seeped and stained under his fingernail, and not her blood. Not her blood.

“Mama.”

—

The green was in his fingers. The tips. Glowing and pulsing and spreading over his palms,

and up his sides and

down his thighs and pooling in his

toes.

—

It started small, a tiny blip of color on the readout screen, and jumped over like a live current and into his hands, scarred and broken and gnarled with age. Bruce held it in his palms as he approached the room where Alfred was laying, tubes and wires spiraling like the whorls of a seashell in a maddening spiral of illness, his wizened gaze heralding him like a beacon, nonetheless. Nonetheless. The green shivered across the tips of Bruce’s fingers from the dancing, singing cellophane he held as he approached.

The slivers of green were there, in the man’s eyes, deeper now that his hair had gone grey and then white, and saddened with time and each successive blow this life had offered them, both of them, merciless. The green remained as it always had, when they brought his mother and father home from the morgue, buried them, and faced the darkness alone.

But when he turned to look at Bruce, just like he had in the foyer, there, that day—his life upturned, anchor snipped, those skittering words spelling out an end to a life he’d once called his own—there was no space left upon the sheet, thismessage, for his sadness, now. There was only Bruce, his boy, standing there with grey speckling his temples like a lover’s kiss and holding that darkness, all of it there in his palms, except for the sapling green thread running through the center of it all, a sprig of life, sprung eternal, bursting from his touch.

He hands the trembling leaf of promise, teeth chattering with the force of it, to the older man and watched as he settled it against his knees, watched his expression, unfilled tears drifting over lashes the color of new snow and pattering against an oath inscribed upon darkness, sublime and unyielding.

—-

When he laughs, and it filters through his eyes, it’s like an explosion of color, green and lush, bright cells of promise and fortitude melting across Bruce’s tongue, pulling him through the darkness, where it roots, shoots up, pushes him towards an unending horizon, filled with the promise of their will for him. His strength, hollowing out under the press of his thumb in the fabric of this new reality, verdant and reborn and full of life. Marking out a place for the life he wills into being simply by remembering that, by remembering them all.