Disclaimer: I don't own Young Justice.
Rating: high T for a scene toward the end.
Notes: this was meant to be for the yj anon meme, but it kind of got...weird. anyway, title taken from Florence + The Machine's "Seven Devils." Hope you enjoy :)
Seven Devils
Living with Conner meant living with sound.
It was always something: the static murmur of the TV, whispered conversations with Wolf, laughter at her failed cooking. Rage, sometimes; rage at Superman and rage at Cadmus.
It wasn't always fun, but it was better than silence.
(On Mars, she went days without hearing a voice, mental or otherwise. People were tired. People were scared.)
When Conner died, Mount Justice became mute.
Zatanna tried, everyone tried to bring life back into the iced walls. Rooms that had been unoccupied for years were dusted as the team took to spending nights there, together. The League, too, sporadically used the mountain as a base of operations when the Watchtower could not be trusted.
(Haven't you heard? Everyone is a mole.)
It made sense that when the League dwindled to only a few members and the team consisted of three mismatched sidekicks, things just...splintered. No more heroes - not as a unit, at least, not a group dedicated to fighting the good fight. Batman retreated to Gotham; Wonder Woman returned to Themyscira; and Aquaman forced Kaldur to remain in Atlantis where things were - for the most part - safe.
So it's just them, now. Wally and M'gann. He hasn't seen his parents in years, hasn't seen his aunt in two, and it's not like she ever had a family here to begin with. No one bothers to check in on the mountain, not since half of it was blown away.
Desperation brought them here. Necessity makes them stay.
It's mid-December when he shows up, shivering and swearing. There's red on his face and hands and when she asks him to sit, he yells - yells how it doesn't matter anymore, how none of this matters anymorebecause everyone's dead.
"I didn't want this," he says. They're sitting on the floor of her room, him leaning against her. "I never wanted this."
During her first days on earth, M'gann forgot how young they all were. Children, really; children thinking themselves adults and throwing their lives to the frontlines to fight an invisible war. She never considered herself much older, not in Martian years, but now - she's seeing the difference. She's been touched by war before, thrashed by it.
Wally - and everyone else - hasn't. When they put on their uniforms, it was for a show, a game, a goal. Not a lifestyle.
"You're going to see them again," she tells him. It's the only truth she cantell him.
"Not soon enough," he says, drawing his knees close. "That's the way these things happen - the brave ones always go first."
She's half-afraid that she'll step into his room one day to find him bleeding, hanging, choking. Doesn't matter that this is Wally, the same Wally who braved lightning for speed, the same Wally who lived for making horrible puns. It's different now. He's different now, and M'gann takes to sitting outside his room, listening.
The first night he's murmuring names that are found only on gravestones.
The second, he sobs.
The third night he screams.
There are red half-circles on her palms and as she stands her knees crack and groan. Don't bother, her body tells her; don't bother. Don't bother going in if you know he's going to leave like the rest.
(It's like - breathing. She knows she'll die one day, but she keeps breathing anyway.)
She cracks the door open, and on the rumpled bed there's a huddled figure rocking back and forth. To her credit she only hesitates for a second - long enough for her to think, fleetingly, of the consequences, of the last time she was on someone's bed - and then she's beside him, arms around him and chin pressed to his hair.
"Shh," she murmurs, "I'm here, it's okay, I'm here."
He might be talking, or trying to talk, but all she can make out are garbled words and sounds. Spider, she thinks; he's like a spider, can't make a sound, not even when his lungs are being crushed.
In the big picture, he's lost more than her: family and friends and foes. His home is, was, here on earth, with all of these people, all of these dead people. Twisted as her family is, M'gann still has something back on Mars; it's not much, but it's there, fractured and broken and working. It makes sense that he's crying and she couldn't even muster up a tear or two for Conner's funeral: Wally's an innocent despite his costume, and she...isn't.
(M'gann is a survivor. It's not as glorious as it sounds.)
They slip into an easy enough routine: wake, eat, talk, sleep. The TV is never turned on, computers have been offline for years, and all but three of the mountain's entrances have been sealed off. Sections, including the gym and Red Tornado's room, are missing from the blasts, but otherwise the mountain reminds M'gann of some sort of private island where the residents are removed from the outside world.
When she falls asleep at night, shame lines her stomach.
Not fair, not fair - here she is, unmarked hands, and there everyone else is, screeching and howling. Not much of a hero, not a hero at all, but what else can she do? What else can anyone do?
(Some days, most days, she thinks even doing this - living - is asking too much.)
It's not...better with Wally here. Alone, M'gann could ignore reality, could just pretend that the team and the League had been an elaborate dream, that them being gone just meant she'd woken up at last. The mountain resembles Mars in its solitude and silence; it's easy for her to forget. But with Wally around, it's almost like old times except there are sentences left hanging and gaps in their conversations, it's almost like she's actually Megan Morse again, and that -
M'gann has never been very strong, not physically. To be Megan Morse means to be human, and she's learned one thing from watching Robin and Artemis and Wally and the rest: humans are strong, invincible, unbreakable. She is not.
(M'gann hides under her green Martian skin.)
There are nights where she sleeps in his room, and he hers. Clothes are sometimes there and sometimes not; no one is here to watch them, to judge, and to be quite honest - they don't care. It's not a romance they're building in this half-frozen castle; it's a survival, a means to an end.
She won't lie: M'gann feels alive, feels fire on her skin during those nights. Wally traces the freckles spilling down her sides, fake as they are, and connects the dots with his fingers, naming constellations. Then there are nights where Wally connects the dots and names names: the hunter, the dancer, the fighter, the leader, the rebel. Names from an older age, names she can't get her mouth to shape - the thought of them closes her throat and she feels like she's choking, drowning.
(The problem is that for the team, the nightmare training session ended when she woke up. For her, for the Martian, the nightmare carried on when the sun fell. Every night, for all her nights.
M'gann can't say their names because she's been screaming them for years. After a while, words said over and over lose their meaning, lose their sense.)
A war breathes outside their walls. Wally holds her hip loosely, just barely touching her, and when he looks at her he does so for only a second before turning to the darkened window. He's still now; as children in armor, he was in constant motion, rearing for a fight and for a cause. They have a cause, they have a fight; it's just much easier to leave it for another.
"Do you think we're ever going to win?"
She shifts in his arms. Wally is lean where Conner was broad; his bones dig into her. "No," she says, dragging a piece of hair away from her mouth. Her nails scrape against her face. "What would we fight with? Sticks?"
"We could." His fingers start a beat on her, drumming. War drums, powerful, old. She remembers the songs of Mars, the wailing songs. "We could fight, you know. Stop hiding here."
M'gann likes hiding, but Wally already knows that so she says nothing.
"If I - if we, I mean - if we started looking, if we found heroes, do you think we could win?"
There are no more heroes on earth, she thinks; but then, M'gann hasn't left this cave to see the world in years. It's changed. Heroes grow like weeds, one villain had once sworn, like hydras.
Heroes are cut down like weeds, too.
"We tried fighting before. We lost. We lost everything."
"Not everything," he's quick to say. "I'm here. You're here."
M'gann can't help it: she laughs, falling on her side. Her hair tumbles over her shoulders and she looks at Wally, almost patronizing in her affection. "You're here," she agrees. "Am I?"
One day, Artemis haltingly confided in M'gann that Wally's defining trait was his eyes. Stupid green eyes, she'd mumbled, but she'd been smiling.
Wally's green eyes bore into M'gann. "Fight with me, Meg," he says. "Fight with me. Please."
His fingers are still dancing, and she realizes she was wrong earlier: he's never slowed down, Wally. Doesn't know how to slow down, how to stop and bow.
She feels herself changing.
(Outside, the world roars.)