Beaches.
Spoilers for 'Batgirl: Destruction's Daughter' and 'Teen Titans: Titans East'. Written because while I'm not completely sure I like their methodology, I'm really, really happy that DC brought Batgirl back.
Standard disclaimers apply.
Whenever the water receded, the sand was left smooth, or wavy, or hillocked up, or any of a thousand variations on that theme, but universally lacking the distinctive shape of human footprints. Cleansed? Or merely changed anew? It was hard to tell, and she doubted the sand cared.
That was the thing about beaches, she supposed. A vast expanse of sand; white and blinding, broken here and there by tangled patches of drying seaweed. Gulls cawed and bickered in the air, fighting over the choicest low-tide morsels scattered along the sand. Deliberately, she ignored the similarities to the bloody brawl she and the others had been involved in mere hours previously.
She half expected to find a washed up body. The old Titan's Island was tidily tucked into the bay of a major metropolitan centre, after all, and the tides of nature were unlikely to be even slightly ruffled by the fierce possessiveness demonstrated by the original Teen Titans. The water would put whatever was offered to it wherever it would, whether polluted detritus or dregs of humanity. But such a finding would have settled the seagulls' spats very neatly, and there was no evidence of it at all.
No evidence that she herself had been in a killing rage mere hours earlier. Ready to leave just such a feast for the scavenger birds, determined to, in fact. Provided that the feast was one Deathstroke.
The sand was clean, and smooth, and unbroken.
Just as well.
But the passionate rage in her soul was slowly settling into ice cold hate, something no less powerful for all it lacked fiery spontaneity. He'd taken her mind. Only now had she got it back.
She'd seen death. She'd – for want of a better term – lived through it twice. She knew what came next, what happened before Shiva driven resurrection or Pit-derived reanimation.
She'd sent several that way herself, and while the first could not be blamed in any way on Deathstroke's serum, a good many that followed could.
'Could' be blamed, probably would be blamed by Robin and perhaps others. He loved her, she knew. She could read it in his body. He didn't know it, didn't realise, but he did. She was family and he had precious little of that left, and so he loved her. And that meant he would blame the serum, give her the same 'mitigating circumstance' that had seen Ravager set free by the courts - and that he didn't quite trust. And he would be oblivious to the blatant double standard favorably applied to his leather-clad family member. She would be innocent, to him.
But she could not be, to herself. It had not been a vial of liquid that had pulled those triggers, had sent those daggers, or fists or feet, flying so unerringly to their targets. Whether mind-clouded or not, it was her own sin.
She felt her gorge rise. Swallowed it. Don't spatter the sand.
Death was often impermanent, in the world they lived in. But those deaths? The businessman in Gotham (shot in front of Timothy as a sick gift) the girl in New York, all of them . . . those deaths would not be revoked, and even if they were, it would not change the fact that she had killed them. Rebirth by definition required death.
That was all to the good. Resurrection hurt like hell, a lot more than dying, and she of all people should know.
But it did not change the fact that there were people who had breathed and pushed blood through arteries and eaten and loved and cried and danced and hated and . . . And she had stopped them doing that.
This, then, was sin. There was no penance great enough. She knew that. She'd known it since she was eight.
She took a step out onto the beach. Low tide now, and the sand had dried into a smooth crust. It shattered into a crazy crackwork of chunks beneath her foot, the smooth surface tolerating barely any pressure before losing all cohesion. The simile was not lost upon her. Hastily she pulled her foot back, watching as the grain piled in, stealing detail away from the footprint.
Like the serum had stolen the detail away from her, leaving only a vague Cassandra-shaped spot in the world where once she had stool, determined and dedicated to the quest that the Bat, on its glorious golden disc, had symbolized. Save lives about to be wrongly lost. Fight the crime that endangers those lives.
Simple, really. She wondered if she was still worthy of the task. She had sworn an internal fealty to it so very long ago, before she had words. She remembered Batman asking her if she was loyal to him, and she'd replied no, not him, but to his symbol. He'd understood.
She wondered if he'd tolerate her now. She had broken the cardinal rule, trampled upon that most sacred of edicts. He might well toss her aside, broken and soiled, unfit to continue the crusade. The pain of that thought took her breath away.
Grimly, she walked out onto the sand. She had killed. That could never change. But was she a killer?
The thought was anathema.
Well, that was something to start with. Quietly, she walked out onto the sand.
Beginning.
A/N: Short drabble I woke up wanting to write. Not entirely sure what DC's doing with my favorite Batgirl these days as I haven't been able to get to my comic shop of late, but I felt the need to scribble this one down. C&C as always greatly appreciated.