When the night is long and her bed is bare, she will often search for the past.
She keeps the totems hidden in the closet, concealed by a sheath of drawers and shielded with lock and key. There is no particular reason for her to veil them, as they are merely memories. But it is a ritual of sorts for her, and it helps her keep them close. It helps her remember.
Turning the small copper key as her wrist twists, the drawer pops open, revealing flashes of color and old, nearly forgotten images.
She picks up one such artifact, turning it over in her hands, and holds it in front of her, studying it with the eye of a detective. Here we have a young boy, certainly no more than 9 years old. His thick, black hair is tousled upon his head, and his eyes gleam a bright turquoise blue of youth and enthusiasm. She smiles. This is how she will always remember him, when they first locked eyes. All optimism and childlike wonder at the world. Even after all that had happened to him.
His head is turned, looking over his shoulder at the camera, and in his hands is a basketball, a rustic brown, its leather faded. He is, no doubt, cockily showing off his moves to whomever must have been watching. She shakes her head, still smiling, and places the picture on the carpet beside her.
The next item is different in many respects. Its edges are torn, and part of the picture itself is water-stained and blurry. But it doesn't keep her smile from vanishing, as she takes in the black-and-white scene. Twin caskets, surrounded on both sides by mountains of pure ivory roses, are being placed slowly into the earth. An entourage of people surrounds the burial, but her eyes move across the picture for only one. When she locates him, she sighs. It's the same boy from the other picture, but here his grin is gone, and instead he watches numbly as his family is covered by ground. He is in the front row, standing next to a much larger man whose features she instantly recognizes, although younger; the toned body, dark hair, set jaw, deep eyes. Expensive suit, likely. The multibillionaire, who has done so much and yet so very little.
She exhales roughly, biting her lip, and puts the photo on the floor. She reaches for another flashback, knowing it will likely be full of old ghosts, bringing either great joy or crushing pain. Her life has been full of such extremes. After a while, one gets rather used to it, expecting it even in the smallest of things. A single image can do so much.
But fortunately, this one brings a smile to her lips. It is one of the boy and herself, finally, the two of them posing charismatically for the camera. The boy is a few years older, his hair no less tousled, and his eyes back to their incessant gleam. She, herself, is young and hopeful, with her flash of bright hair falling down to her shoulders in waves. They have their arms around one another, she laughing and the boy throwing up a peace sign. In the background is the city. Gotham City, as it was back then.
The story goes by more quickly now, as she sifts through the photographs like grains of sand all making up the hourglass of 25 years. Here: the beginning of the adventuring. Twin costumes, the boy's with a 'R' enclosed in a circle stitched into the left breast, hers with a yellow bat curling across the chest. Here: the first mission together. A shared grappling hook as the boy grasps her hand before she plunges to the streets below. A newspaper boy had taken this photo, she remembers. The photo is yellowed and thin, clipped from the Gotham paper many years ago. Here: the rigorous training that was their lives every day. The boy balancing on a beam as he desperately tries to ward off sharp snaps of the fist by the multibillionaire. The boy is older in this picture, she notices. His legs are longer, leaner, and his hair is jagged at the edges, falling down onto his forehead. And here: the first team, a group of misfits who hardly could agree on what pizza to order, let alone on who should be their leader. The boy was eventually chosen anyway. She had always known he would be. He could lead them like no one else could, despite only having lived 13 years. He had jumped headlong into every battle, as the girl with the green skin, the boy from the oceans, the fastest kid alive, the Kryptonian teenager, the girl with the arrows, and herself followed.
And finally, here: The leaving.
She frowns, knowing who took this picture. It had been herself, faced with one of the toughest decisions she had ever had to make. Follow the boy, who was almost a man, or stay close to the people she had known since birth? Follow the boy to Blüdhaven, or stay in Gotham, with her father, with her mentor, with her friends?
In the picture, the boy is standing at the window looking at her, his cape in his hands and his mask torn away from his eyes. For once, his deep blue irises shimmer with a sort of inner conflict and insecurity, with the spark of anger that she hated seeing in him. He was exposed and yet hidden behind a veil of hurt and a lust for his own independence. This picture had taken place on the last night he had stayed at the mansion, before the first night when she would have to lie in bed, wondering where in the world he might be.
After that, the pictures are scare for a while. It had been a hard time for her and for everyone. She takes the pictures in slightly trembling hands, pictures of her and her father, the brave commissioner, with every one of his many battles etched into the wrinkles on his face. She takes the newspaper clippings and wipes away the dust that covers them, tales of a masked vigilante in Blüdhaven, of a new rescue here, a daring escape there. She takes the letters from her old friends and sits cross-legged on the carpet, trying to decipher the nearly illegible handwriting of Wally or Artemis. She takes the memories and forces herself to keep them down, while her whole being threatens to let them go, throw them back into the box before she gets any deeper.
But she digs further. She needs to do this, if only to remind herself of what she and the boy have been through. Of what she would die for everyday, if it came to that.
Finally, she finds the letter she was looking for. A letter scrawled by the hand of someone who was always moving, not one very taken with sitting still and writing a long letter. A letter written nervously but with strong intent. A letter telling her that he missed her, missed her terribly, and was going to come to Gotham in two weeks. And then they would be together in the way they should have been if he had never left at all.
But destiny, fate, whatever one would like to call it…has a strange way of changing things, of defying expectations, of twisting that which is reality.
Certainly, they had been reunited. She closes her eyes as she thinks of this. Yes, they had been reunited, and it had been heaven from the first moment they touched. She had always known that it was him, him who was the only man who had enough gusto, enough determination to sweep her off her feet until she simply couldn't resist anymore. And, oh, she had resisted him. Dates rejected, flowers left behind, kisses given but never returned…she had done all that she could to keep from falling. She'd seen what could happen to a trampled heart, and her no-nonsense manner had kept her headstrong. But she had always known it was him, had known from the very beginning. One usually does.
She runs her hands across her face now, and through her hair, still long and bright and delicate. She's nearing the bottom of the memories, about to hit the very last souvenir, and she prepares herself. There are a few more pictures, one of her and him together, in one of those last few weeks. In this photo, he is much taller now that he is a man, his hair slightly longer but no less dark, his gaze more intense but no less teasing. She herself is sitting in his lap, grinning happily while his hands grip her shoulders, his thumbs pressed soothingly into the back of her neck.
She sets the picture aside, her eyes lingering on his face. It's as if she can still feel his breath against her cheek, as if she can still feel his fingers rest on her shoulders, as if she can still feel her back pressed against the tight muscles of his stomach.
Finally, she reaches the last newspaper clipping.
A battle was raging in the Middle East, one that was so large that it was calling for the Justice League. So little had been known about it at the time of this clipping. How could anyone know that so much time, so much matter could be twisted by these creatures that called themselves The Auras?
She stands up, taking the drawer into her hands and bringing it with her to the bed, reading the clipping as she walks. It speaks sparsely about several explosions that occurred in several Middle Eastern deserts, and of a large-scale earthquake that ripped across the Fertile Crescent, not caused by any fault line or tectonic motion. It barely mentions the strange men and women who began to appear among the Arabians, among the Egyptians, known as The Auras. And it doesn't say a single thing about the powers those people possessed.
She sets the box aside for a moment, clenching her fists angrily. They were so blind. The war is over now, dead and gone, but its after-effects still live. If they don't actively live out in the world, they live in her mind, replaying themselves over and over like devilish nursery rhymes. Ring around the rosy, a pocket full of posy…ashes, ashes…we all fall down.
Finally, she turns back to the drawer full of memories, a window to the past. She knows the only remaining object left in the box, and yet she is still afraid to take it into her fingers. But she gathers her pride, chastising herself for the hurt and the fear, and brings out the very last item.
It slips delicately into the palm of her hand, cool and smooth, nearly blinding with its shine. A silver engagement ring, its center occupied by a beautiful pure white diamond, cut to what she would argue was perfection. Smaller, lovelier gems sprout out along its edges like petals from a flower, like twin wings rising from the back of an angel. She observes it carefully, feeling the knot rise up in her throat, as her fingers gently turn the ring over and over again, allowing each individual streak of silver, each tiny diamond to be touched by the lamp light.
He had asked her to marry him the night before the battles began in the Middle East. It had been so like him, to take her out onto a rooftop, wrap his arm around her waist, and carry her across the sky with nothing but a grappling line and his own ferocious sense of freedom and well-being. He had taken her to the place where they used to meet, at the corner between the café and the bookshop, at midnight when the moon struck the cement in her favorite way. And he had bent down on one knee, and everything inside of her had screamed not to let herself fall, not to give in, to get away from the promise that he wanted her to make. But God knows she couldn't resist those eyes. She hadn't known of a single girl who could.
Now, she lifts her gaze to the cloudless night, and swallows with difficulty. He's out there somewhere, looking at the same sky, but in a different place entirely. Who could ever have known that those mad men-those Auras- could manipulate time, could send a person spiraling back years and years into the past, or hurtling forward decades and decades into the future? For that's what happened to him. She had been by his side, fighting alongside him to the death. She had clutched his hand as the blood poured from their gashes, and he had heard him yell when he was hit by the magic, when the light left his eyes and his body slowly faded into a vortex that she could not touch, that was, to her, completely intangible. She had no way to know what time he had been sent to.
She had done everything she could to find him. The multibillionaire who had trained her, the Justice League, her father, her friends…all of them said that she could do nothing but wait. She had tried libraries, history books, searching for any mention of a man that could be her man, sent back to a time that was not his. But there was nothing that could make her sure, nothing that even began to convince her. She would come home every night more hopeless than she had started out.
And now, five years have passed. Five years since the great fight that had ended in a victory for the Justice League but a loss for herself. No one knows if he can come back, if he ever will come back, or when he will if he ever does. It is the question that truly kills her, each and every night, the fact that she truly doesn't know if her waiting is futile, or whether it will all pay off in the end.
And yet she continues her ritual. Tonight, as she has done every March 21st for the past five years, she walks down into the basement and lights a candle. Her left hand's fingers caress the silver of the engagement ring while her right hand's fingers coax the wax to burn. Then she sits herself at the old oak table with a small slice of cake. She goes to the window, opens it, sits back down. She lets the moonlight pour into the room; doesn't turn on a light. She lets the breeze fly in and out, weaving across her forehead and through her hair. For a moment, she just breathes.
Then, not allowing for a second the thought of crying to enter her mind, she whispers, "Happy Birthday, Dick."
And if she closes her eyes tight enough, she can almost hear his laughter echoing in the streets.
Author's Note:
Well, since today is technically Dick's birthday, I thought I'd write a little piece to celebrate it. :)
This is my first Dick/Babs story, and my first real Batman story in general, so please feel free to read and review. I would greatly appreciate it!
~Star