The Mother
by TwinEnigma
AN: Originally posted on my tumblr. This is based on the "Pit Verse" by mgnemesi on tumblr. In such, the Lazarus Pit restores all of you, every corner of your soul and every crack of your being. Graciously, we have been allowed to poke around in that verse, though our ideas may differ.
I'll include notes I couldn't on tumblr at the end.
Warnings for: Violence, character death, sexuality (het and gay), implied abuse
Talia did not understand why Jason, little more than a shell of himself at the time, trusted her instinctively. She did not understand why he did not flinch or attack when she alone struck him, or why it was only her voice that could elicit tears from him at news of her beloved. She had theories, of course, of recognition on some base level, of souls and reincarnation based on her father's long-ignored tomes of accumulated lore, and that perhaps, in the most mundane of explanations, that the trauma of his return was so complete that he had shut himself within and could not find his way out.
She understands now.
Each time she drowns in the Lazarus Pit, another fragment of herself awakens.
Each time she coughs up the waters of life, she is a little more than she was.
Now, she stands as a legion in one body, the sum of herself and all that have come before.
And she remembers.
In one time, she is the daughter of a senator. The war with Sparta rages and her father spends hours in meetings with the boy he is mentoring: young, handsome Gregorios. He teaches the boy how to fight, how to speak, and how to scream like a woman on his belly.
At night, she is the one who mends the marks of her father's lessons. She reminds him of all the things her father wants to beat out of him and he welcomes her as friend for it.
He dies when father loses his patience with him. Eventually, she dies at her husband's hand, but inside she has been dead for much longer.
They don't meet again for a long time.
Lives cascade like waterfalls, some only fragments of an infant's consciousness before they pass, consumed and sublimated into the totality of herself, and in all that time, she never sees him.
And then, she is a princess.
On her wedding day, the women of her house make her beautiful for her betrothed, a boy she has never met. You are to marry a king, they tell her as they apply oil to her hair and work in the ornaments and fresh flowers. It is a good match, they say as they paint her arms and hands in turmeric paste and apply the Anjana to her eyes. When they are finished with the Solah Sringar, she stands a bride, radiant and resplendent in red, and waits for her husband to arrive.
She is the last to see him, but she recalls the way her heart skipped a beat at the sight of his face and the way she suddenly felt at ease. Even so young, with hardly even the start of a beard on his chin, she knows him somehow.
Talia meets him again, many times. More often than not, he is a nobleman. Sometimes, he is a monk or a scholar. Other times, he is a warrior, a leader of men, a captain of industry. She meets them all, sometimes as a healer, sometimes as a student, and sometimes as a servant. There are times that he's her lover and there are times that she is his rival. There are lives where she is the scandal that hangs over him – the kept boy with the too-pretty face, the exotic wife from a far-off land, the society girl he must discreetly shut away in the countryside, the handsome flyboy in leathers he must keep a secret . And in others, he is the scandal of her life – the philanderer, the outlaw, the woman of loose morals that tastes of absinthe, the secret lover that cuckolds her husband in his own house.
She recognizes him now as Bruce Wayne.
Sometimes, her father appears, too, but eventually he disappears from her path.
But Bruce does not.
And neither do his children.
Oh, here and there, they may wander from her path, but it is never for long and never too far.
She is, after all, family and she remembers these things.
When she is Indrani, she gives her king a son, Asem. He is beautiful, a handsome boy with his father's eyes and dark curls. There is mischief in him, but he is clever and she knows one day he will be a good king.
Jason is not Asem – his skin is pale where Asem's was dark and he is not as innocent as Asem.
But that is the Pit's doing.
She hopes it is, anyway, because Indrani remembers dying, the screams of her second son, newly born and already mourning even in his swaddling cloth. She remembers blood and Asem who is not Jason. She remembers naming the baby, Rayan, in a breath and she keens to the sky as she dies because her beloved king who is not Bruce is dead, murdered by assassins, and then nothing as her memories drift into other lives.
She sees them in photographs, sees Jason, and now that she knows about the Pit's other property, she wonders.
Wonders if he remembers, too.
Wonders about Asem, about Rayan.
But Indrani is dead and so are her sons. They have been for a long time. It is, perhaps, best not to learn how they met their ends.
A mother cannot bear to know these things.
Nor can grandmothers.
It is Truffenni that remembers Damian, recognizes him as Diverous Grauson. He is her grandson then, slender and fast, with a knack for sleight of hand that gets him in trouble with gaje. Oh how, her son, Richard (not Dick, never Dick), scolds him when he catches him pulling bujo, but even he sees his boy is good in the spot, a skilled dancer and flier. And he is so kind, so very kind, that even Ossin (not Jason, not Asem) does not need to hold his cats back for the boy.
But then Timur (not Tim) comes to them and a black rage settles on Diverous. Les louat diniele. It is beyond fathoming and even dukkipen can't tell her what is wrong, only that it in the past. Not even her Bruno, the Rom Col of the troupe, can get him to explain why he loathes the contortionist with every fiber of his being or what one of their cousins, an otherwise kind and loving boy, had done to earn such hatred.
He takes increasingly daring risks in his rage, risks in the spot that would spell his own death if even one thing went wrong, and she cannot bear it.
She knows now, knows it is a rage from some wrong another Tim has committed, somewhere, some when, long ago and forgotten in time, and that on some level it has stayed with Damian, burned into his soul like a brand.
Talia knows these things, because she remembers Tim, too.
Remembers him in her arms, pink and raw with tiny hands like stars that grip like iron, remembers Witold laughing at the strength of his son, the way her elder son delighted in being a big brother to this new (not) Tim and remembers the way the boy read everything in sight, devouring knowledge of Greek and Latin like he was starved for it. The way her husband crumbled inside at her oldest son's death (he is not Dick, Dick is alive) and it was all she could do to send the younger away before the plagues and the wars took him from them too.
She remembers the young man that looked up at her with those eyes and fragmented in the absinthe haze like a mosaic of time and space, and how Bernie laughed, her cigarette-deep voice rolling in the darkness of the burlesque that she'd remember having a son. Thinks that she knows him, all of his reflections, from cradle to grave, before she laughs too and buries her face in Bernie's tits because those are new from last time round and quite nice actually.
She recalls the way that everyone stares in London, stares at her, and her son, Damon, dark and foreign in this strange, foggy land. How not-Tim stares at her in her sari disapprovingly and sneers at Wyndham in ill-concealed anger for replacing his mother, Celeste, with a foreigner from the colonies. How she pretends not to see the way not-Tim abandons his wife for the pretty Irish maid that is not Jason (and yet is) and how his barren wife pretends that she sees nothing, but raises the child as her own. The way Wyndham pretends he does not know the truth and frets over the marriage prospects of not-Tim's sisters Davina and Stephanie, because London is nothing if not built on scandal and gossip in their class.
She remembers Dick who is her son and not and sometimes he just a boy Bruce has taken home, but other times he is a thief and she catches him, makes him work for his supper and gives him thin stew. Other times, he is a friend who listens when Bernie does not and Wyndham can't be persuaded. When she is Truffenni and young, she can see Bruno in him – but now she can also see the bits that are Damian and laughs because she knows Richard will be a hellion for years before he settles down like a good boy and he isn't the sort to do that casually
Castles, kingdoms, slaves, Vikings…
She remembers them all.
How Tim and Jason seek each other out, drawn inexorably together by some gravity of fate, in every cycle.
How Richard is kind and unfailing and always the first, because someone must call his siblings back from their wanderings.
How the rage in Damian is strongest when he's Jason's blood brother.
She has paid to bring them into the world in the blood of her past lives and has paid to keep them there with her futures. She is mother to each of them more often than not.
So she knows now why she was able to get through to Jason.
And when she next sees him, he stares at her, his arms raised protectively around Tim.
"أبنائي" she says and becomes everything that she has ever been for a moment.
Suddenly, Asem recognizes his mother and contorts Jason's lips into a smile that tells her that he does remember her. Tim is only seconds behind, his eyes narrowing and then opening wide in realization.
"Be happy," she tells them and dives off the roof, line gun already in hand.
She understands.
And maybe, next time around, things will be better.
FURTHER NOTES (not included on Tumblr):
My personal beliefs regarding reincarnation color this a lot. I don't tend to believe in one singular soulmate, but rather a group of souls that care for each other and keep crossing each other's paths, though not necessarily in the same roles in their lives - hence why Talia is Bruce's friend in one incarnation, his lover or wife in others, why Talia is sometimes the mother to one of the batbrothers or a few of them but their grandmother or friend in others, and sometimes just dies young and never meets any of them in more. It's really meant to be fluid and I wish it had flowed better, but it didn't or I've have included more of the off incarnations where she's a rival or ends up being in the sister or daughter role. I also regret not being able to include the bit with Selina, but it just did not flow.
Talia, in this, is more Brucesexual because she recognizes and feels comfortable with his soul on some level, and identifies spiritually as "the mother" partially because her lives tend to overlap with the others in that role and partially because she is a mother in her current incarnation and so identifies more strongly with those memories. Were this one of the lives where she is a guy, she'd probably identify as "the father" or "big brother."
There are some other, small things, you may notice.
One of which is that Ra's is mentioned to have stopped crossing her path, meaning he eventually leaves the chain of reincarnation - presumably when he starts using the Lazarus Pits.
Another is the incarnation of Damian that is a flier (aerialist/trapeze artist) called Diverous Grauson, who she notes to take increasing risks in "the spot" (or performance). Diverous is a Romani name and Grauson is, literally, German for "Grayson" - quite literally giving a nod to Dick's family's origins.
The Arabic she uses is literally "My son" - again, she identifies as the spiritual "mother."
I kind of want to go back through and re-tool this, try to make the concepts of fluid souls and fluid relationships from life to life more salient, maybe develop her relationship to Dick's soul a bit more, but I'm really hesitant of screwing this up further, especially when I've probably diverged quite far from Neme's concept and am just going to make a mess of things.