Chapter Eleven: Be not truly wise

"Though in life he wealth attained
Though the praise of men he gained
He shall join those gone before
Where the light shall shine no more.
Crowned with honor though he be
Highly gifted, strong and free
If he be not truly wise
Man is like the beast that dies."
-Psalm 49, Psalter 136, "The Issues of Life," traditional funeral hymn

For a moment, he didn't move.

His skin and his insides burned, as if scraped against something solid and hard, blistering, scalded, shaking. Lying on the ground, his chest rose and fell as he gasped for the icy, salty morning air, shivering as his very molecules cooled.

He felt a roiling in his stomach and, with tremendous effort, shifted onto his side, tasting sour vomit in his mouth. He coughed, spat onto the sand beside him; then focused, cleared his mind, took control of his body with three slow breaths, and opened his eyes.

Iris was merely feet away. Her face was turned away from him, her head bobbing slightly up and down with the rhythm of the waves. He watched her bright hair in the water for a long time, then slowly became aware of a slight pressure on his lower body. His eyes flickered downward to where her legs were splayed haphazardly across his own. The weight was a familiar one, but the tangle of limbs was unsettling, an eerie mirror image of their time together, the intimacy of their touch distorted by the limpness in her body, the stillness of her chest.

Damian's spine tingled, tracing down the length of his back from the base of his neck. Stillness. It was disconcerting to see her completely still at last, but it was also a strange sort of relief, until it dawned on him that she wasn't moving at all. She was too still.

Placing his palms against the soft, uneven sand, Damian heaved himself up to his hands and knees, her legs sliding off his own as he moved. Unsteadily, still trembling, his stomach and throat full of bile waiting to be retched, he crawled to Iris's side and reached out his hands, hovered them just above her body.

He tried to speak, but couldn't; he paused, cleared his throat with a violent cough, expelling watery, sour saliva from his mouth, and then touched her. "Iris," he whispered hoarsely, turning her body to face him completely. Her head lolled loosely towards his body, a sliver of white just barely visible beneath her half-closed eyes. He pulled her onto his lap, then took off his gloves, pressed his fingers, fingers far warmer than they should be, onto her cheek, cold and wet from the ocean's touch. "Iris," he whispered again, panic rising from somewhere deep within him. He pressed two fingers to her neck. He took hold of her wrist, counting to ten. Feeling nothing.

There was no time to fear, no time to mourn. He pulled her out of the water, onto drier sand, and then placed two hands on her, starting rhythmic chest compressions, counting under his breath. "One, two, three, four…"

He reached thirty. Put fingers to her chin, cleared her airways, and lowered his mouth onto hers, breathing sweet life into her dysfunctional lungs.

"One, two, three, four…"

"Damian."

"…eight, nine, ten…"

"Damian."

"…thirteen, fourteen, fifteen…"

"Stop."

"No."

"Move."

"No."

"Damian."

He didn't hesitate, only pressed his mouth against Iris's again, supplying her with another breath. Then, a hand on his shoulder, roughly pulling him away.

"Stop," she said, her voice low and dangerous, kneeling beside him, reaching behind her to pull something out of her quiver. "You're not helping her."

"Her heart stopped," said Damian suddenly, his terror plain in his voice. "She's not breathing. What happened? She's not breathing, Lian."

"I know that," the other girl replied, almost as if irritated. Taking hold of the collar of Iris's shirt, she tore through the fabric down to the middle of the girl's ribcage. She pulled a modified arrow from her quiver and took a moment to adjust the arrow's device, and then she plunged the arrow straight into Iris's chest; even as Damian screamed, his fingers clawing into Lian's shoulder, towards her neck, Iris's whole body convulsed as if being pulled by invisible strings, and then she was still again and Lian took hold of the arrow and tore it from her body, leaving a small circle of red on her skin. Drops of blood pooled there.

Lian placed her hands on Iris's chest and resumed chest compressions, then, as Damian had done mere moments earlier, lowered her own mouth to Iris's. Damian's vision was slightly blurry and a fog hung across his brain, but even in such a state he saw the way her lips gently touched the other girl's, the way she lingered just a moment too long at her mouth.

He growled, "Stop."

Lian pulled away, but made no indication she had heard him.

"I wasn't sure that that would work," she said, "but it looks like it did. Her heart restarted."

Damian, immediately ashamed of his inappropriate swell of jealousy, looked quickly away from Lian, and reached out fumbling fingers to feel Iris's wrist.

"Speedsters generally respond well to electric interference with their systems," she stated flatly. "I gave her everything I had. She's alive."

A silence.

"But we have to go, Damian."

He didn't look at her.

"They'll be here soon."

"I'm not leaving her."

"I know. I don't want to leave her either. You know I don't. But my father knows I'm here, and by now he probably knows you're here too. They're going to come get us. And now with…with this…"

Damian was shaking his head. "No," he said, a struggle in his voice, as if he could still hardly comprehend what was happening. "No, we didn't…this isn't…"

He let out a shuddering breath, pressing his palms to his eyes.

"He said it was her," he murmured. "He said it was her from the very beginning…"

"It isn't her," said Lian, more urgently now, reaching out to take hold of Damian's arm. "At least, not alone. But we can't stay here any longer, please, Damian, they'll take care of her when they get here, they'll know what to do better than we do, her parents will look after her-"

"Her parents," he whispered. "Her parents already have one child in critical condition, Lian, how could we-"

"We have to go, now."

He looked up at her. He met her dark eyes, wide, open and desperate. One of her hands was curled around his arm, and the other rested on Iris's shoulder, gentle and tender. Slowly, he began to nod. "I know," he said. "I know we have to go."

They were silent, unmoving for a moment, then Lian stood up, softly tugging Damian up with her as well. "She'll recover," she offered him, as a gesture of peace, or maybe of surrender. "You know she will."

He nodded. Slipping on his gloves again, he followed into the garage, into the jet which she fired up, sitting in the pilot's seat with an empty chair beside her as he knelt in the back of the plane for a few moments, still searching for breath. The lurching feeling in his stomach intensified as the jet took off, and he vomited again, silently grateful that Lian had chosen the group jet, which was large enough to warrant the inclusion of a small bathroom. After emptying his stomach, he stood in front of the small sink and splashed water across his face, flinching slightly as the cold water streamed down his face, washing away caked blood around his mouth. He filled his cupped hands with water and brought it to his lips, sucking the cold liquid into his mouth, feeling it drip down his ragged throat. Something felt strange, wrong. There was no mirror with which to check for injuries; he instead had to touch his face, run his fingers across his skin. Yes. His mask was still missing, no doubt lying in Jai's hospital room. He didn't realize how much he had depended on that familiar weight around his eyes, but now that he noticed its absence, he suddenly felt naked, vulnerable. It took him a long while to steel himself enough to return to the main cabin of the jet, to where Lian was guiding them to God knows where.

But he did return to her, and took the seat beside her, strapping himself in, examining the control panel before him. "Where are we headed?" he asked her, his voice completely level.

She was silent for a moment, then confessed, "I don't know exactly. We can't go back to the Tower. Or Star City. Or Gotham."

"What about the safehouse? In the mountains?"

She considered this, then nodded, inputting coordinates. "Your father doesn't know about that place, does he?"

"No. Only the team." He caught himself, and hesitated. "But if we're trying to…avoid the team-"

"We're not," said Lian stonily, matter-of-factly. "There's no one left to hide from."

"Iris knows the place. And she just…" He paused. He breathed, then he didn't. He said, "She just tried to kill me." When he said the words out loud, the truth became more real, somehow indescribably more tangible, and it sickened him deep in his stomach as he remembered, clearly, her weight on his body, her hand clutched around his heart.

"She'll be, at the very least, unconscious for a while," Lian replied, without looking at Damian. "Long enough to sort this out."

"Sort what out?" demanded Damian sharply, turning to her, eyes glinting in the artificial glow of the control panel. "Don't you get it, Lian? Don't you understand what's going on?"

"Of course I do," she replied scathingly, glancing at him disdainfully, before the question was even completely out of his mouth. "What Milagro did to Chris, what Maxine did to Jai, what Iris did to you. It's all part of a plan."

"A plan to destabilize us," continued Damian, the words rushing out of his mouth as though he could not control them. "A plan to tear us apart. An evil plan meant to assert dominance over-"

He broke off suddenly, staring up at her, gaping slightly. She glanced at him again. "What?" she asked, and she couldn't keep the panic out of her voice. "Why are you looking at me like that?"

"Me," he breathed. He wrenched his gaze away from the girl, clutching onto the arms of his seat tightly. "Lian. You shouldn't be alone with me."

A silence.

"I haven't…I haven't been wholly responsible for an attack yet. Yet."

"Damian, please," muttered Lian, without looking at him. "I could take you with my eyes closed."

"You say that, but we don't know for sure – you never sparred with me, I told Iris that would come back to hurt us, I told her, and now who knows if I'll attack you or not and you've never even fought me to anticipate what might – God damn it, so petty, just because you don't like me-"

At this, Lian actually looked over at him, irritation mixed with something like – resignation? – flashing across her face. "I don't not like you," she said, and he looked at her, and she clarified quickly, "I don't – I don't hate you, if that's what you…" She trailed off, knowing exactly what he meant.

There was silence. He peered out of the jet miserably. "Yes you do," he murmured.

"I don't."

"You hate me when I am with Iris."

And the silence somehow condensed, solidified into something tight and uncomfortable. Lian almost cleared her throat, awkwardly shifting slightly, and the reaction was almost comical, too exaggerated, too out-of-place in the dark jet.

"Don't make this about that, Damian," she said lowly. "It isn't. It's not."

Damian didn't reply right away.

Several minutes later, he looked towards her and asked, "You know who's orchestrating this, then?"

Lian nodded. "Everything became pretty clear, once I realized who was at the center of it all."

"Us. All of us."

Lian shook her head. "You."

Silence. The plane angled downwards slightly, beginning its descent into the gentle, sloping mountains. "It's a trap," began Damian cautiously, "meant for the whole team. To remind us that we're…to emphasize the lesson that we don't, in actuality, control any…" His voice trailed off, his argument falling apart in his head. His breathing, loud and irregular, hitched and his brow knit in confusion. "It doesn't…it doesn't make any sense."

Lian hesitated, glanced at him, and then began lowly, "I know what's going through your head right now. I know that you see it, you just don't want to face it. You don't want to admit it. Because you can demonize your father all you want, sure, because tomorrow, he'll be there to show you he's exactly the opposite of what you were afraid he might be. But if someone…if someone is so far away, and you haven't seen or heard from them in so long…I know what you want to believe, Damian. And I don't blame you."

She didn't look at him.

"But your mother is a villain," she said, with finality. "And this was all part of her plan. It's hard for you to admit, because this plan…it wasn't a sick plot to get you back to her. It wasn't some kind of persuasion, where she could come and try to seduce you into abandoning your cause, returning to her. This was a calculated, deliberate attack on those you love, the team you feel directly responsible for. This wasn't about getting you on her side. This was about hurting you."

Damian was shaking his head. "No," he said, but he didn't make a sound, only framed the word with his cold lips. "No," he said again, and this time he did make a sound. "No. No. Not my mother, not after…"

He spread his hands out in from of him, staring down at the colored gloves covering his skin. His vision swam slightly in the darkness of the jet, and his head began to pound, just as the jet hit ground, decelerated, as Lian brought it to a halt outside the safehouse in the wilderness. He didn't move as Lian unbuckled and stood up and opened the hatch, then pulled a firearm from her holster and shot the controls before her three times. Every light glowing in the jet blinked off. All power disappeared. Damian only looked up at her.

"There's a tracer buried somewhere in there," she explained, replacing her gun in the holster at her hip. "Even if I cloaked the jet, they'd be able to find us. It's connected to the ship's main system, though, so the only way to stop it from transmitting our location entirely is to cut all power, break the thing down. This should do for now."

She turned and disappeared out of the aircraft, heading for the entrance to the safehouse hidden in the brush.

Damian sat, for a moment, alone in the jet, staring at the bullet holes in the control panel. The sharp blast of a gun discharging rang in his head. He knew firearms. He had been trained by assassins under his mother's teaching, and again by his father, except no more live ammo, no more lethal shots, the sort of weapons that would do everything but maim and kill. The firearm in Lian's hands had not been one of these weapons.

Lian had shot three times, and Damian had seen the damned thing in her hand. She knew his weaponry training. She knew that he would recognize the gun, its make, its destructive, deadly power. She had shown it right to him, expected him to see it, and Damian stared at the shots in the controls of the jet and his blood ran suddenly icy cold.

Hundreds of miles away, a woman sat in a dim-lit hospital room, her hand holding that of a child's, a girl's. She leaned across the girl's body, putting a hand to her forehead, brushing the hair away from her skin, covered in a cold sweat. The girl's eyes darted rapidly underneath her eyelids. She could have been dreaming. Then, slowly, a noise came from the girl's throat, not a wheeze or an involuntary hacking cough but a quiet rumble, a conscious sound.

With a gasping breath, Sin opened her eyes.

The woman with her pulled her hands away slightly, hovering just above the girl's body, as if afraid to touch her, as if afraid that she would slip away. "Sin," whispered Dinah, tears in her eyes. "Sin, baby. You're okay. You're gonna be okay. Can you hear me?"

Sin looked at her, her eyelids heavy, but her eyes clear, alert. Her hand – the one without a cast still around the wrist – rose slightly, towards her face, and at the spluttering noises, Dinah reached up and pulled down the oxygen mask on the girl's face away from her mouth. "Can you hear me?" she asked again, brushing her fingers across Sin's cold skin.

She nodded, just barely, and then two words came tumbling out of her mouth, urgently: "Big sister."

"Yes," said Dinah, wiping a streaking tear from her own face. "Yes, I'm here, little sister."

Sin moved her head, almost imperceptibly, and said, "No. Big sister."

For a moment, Dinah looked down at the child, her mouth open, hope abruptly dissipating. "Honey," she said, leaning in close to the girl, desperately, "baby, I'm right here. Can you see me? Can you understand my words?"

"No," said Sin, and the shaking of her head became more pronounced now, and she said, "No. Not you. Big sister. My big sister."

She raised her coal-black, weary eyes to Dinah's, a glimmer of panic rising in them.

"Lian," she whispered.

By the time Damian had exited the plane as well and followed Lian into the underground bunker, the girl had the computers up and running, scanning through databases on her own. Outside, in the morning sky, a shooting star seemed to streak across the dim brightness, racing the sun across the horizon. Damian found himself limping slightly, a tightness in his chest that he couldn't shake restricting his breath, making it hard to inhale. He could hear a buzzing somewhere in the back of his head. His fingers wouldn't move right, weren't following the instructions sent from his brain. He blinked back his fatigue, and stood ten feet behind Lian, watching her.

"My father knows where she is," he said, quietly. "We could have gone to him."

Lian glanced back at him. "I don't think you really want to do that."

"No. Not after what he accused me of. Not after I ran from him."

Silence.

"But we could have. We could have gone to him and he would have already investigated the possibility, I'm sure. He would be ready to leave, to personally intercept her, within the hour."

"It's not an option."

"Why not? I'm not so proud that I would refuse his assistance. Not now. And I am his son. He would forgive me."

Her voice, too hard, too stinging, a whip in the night. "I said no."

Damian didn't reply to her immediately. He leaned against the wall, his feet feeling numb. "Why not?" he repeated, and there was less uncertainty in his voice this time.

Lian stopped working, and stood staring at the screen, her elbows locked, supporting herself on the control panel, her lithe form silhouetted perfectly by the artificial light of the computer. She sounded breathless as she spoke, as if murmuring a confession, a prayer. "Iris has marks from my arrows all over her. They'll think I attacked her. I'm not going to let them hold me as they take care of the sick bitch who did this to us."

"She was attacking me," said Damian levelly, reasonably. "You were defending me. You saved my life. I'm a witness. I can confirm."

"They'll think we're both part of it."

"Lian," he said. "How did you hit Iris with that arrow?"

Utter silence.

Then the girl dropped her head, her hands balling into fists. "I knew she was unstable," she whispered. "She was a wreck, you saw her, she was a total wreck. A time bomb. I was sure something would happen eventually. I had a…contingency plan in place."

Damian didn't move.

She turned around to face him, her eyes wide and wet. "They both used to have powers, you know," she explained. "But the divided connection was killing them, tearing them apart. Iris streamlined it. But do you get it, Damian? Jai had that connection. He's always had it. Irey just redirected it."

Damian narrowed his eyes slightly. "What are you saying?"

"All those times she said she needed him," Lian continued, and her words sounded more like a challenge now, as if she was daring him to question her, "how protective she was of him. It was because she knew. She always knew."

She paused. She looked at Damian, her eyes searching his.

"He was her connection to the Speed Force," she murmured. "The only way to save you was to cut it off."

For a long moment, Damian watched her. And then he took a breath, his face hard and set in iron. There was no time for pain tonight. No time for mourning.

He said softly, "You killed Jai."

"I had to stop his heart," she answered, bowing her head slightly. "Just long enough to get you out of there."

"You deceive yourself. You didn't stop his heart. You killed him, Lian. You killed him and you didn't even have to decency to be there in person when you did it."

Her eyes hardened. "You were raised an assassin, Damian," she said stonily. "Decency. Honor. You don't know the meaning of the word."

Silence.

She turned around, back to the computer. "I did what I had to," she said, and her voice was softer now, quieter. "I saved your life."

"I would have rather died."

"Would you have said that, when her hand was in your chest?"

He had no reply to this. He looked at the wall, at the dull, dark floor, at the computer screen before her, at the back of Lian's body, her head, black hair cropped short, combed into an ornate wave on the top of her head, her skin otherwise covered by her uniform, black and dark, deep crimson, her broad back tapering to her narrow waist, her strong legs ending in obsidian-black military-grade boots. But she was so small, compared to Damian, compared to Iris's height. She was small and she had always been quiet but aggressive, assertive, with narrowed eyes, master of the blank, unreadable expression under which she could hide anything. Anything. But she was no longer hiding. The truth had risen to the surface, and she was waiting, he could tell. She was just waiting for him to show her that he knew.

He closed his eyes for a long moment, leaning hard against the wall, and he began, "Just my mother, you say."

She didn't reply.

"No one else. No other leads."

Nothing. She didn't even turn around.

"Despite," he continued, "our primary suspect. You haven't even said his name."

She stopped manipulating the computer's controls.

Damian asked softly, "Why not Deathstroke, Lian?"

She returned to working on the computer. "What are you talking about?"

"You're diverting my attention. Leading me away from him."

"Why would I do that? He's been underground for too long, he's a dead end, that's why I dropped him as a suspect."

"Right," said Damian, and the numbness in his extremities was spreading, "he's been underground for years. Since your father's infiltration of his team. After your apparent death."

Lian stopped moving.

"You do realize I'm familiar with the essentials of that case. Even though you – simply, brilliantly, I should have seen right through it – even though you said you'd check your father's files, search for clues. We had no reason to suspect that you would want to hide something from that case."

She closed the files up on the computer, those of Damian's mother.

Damian said, almost gently, "I know that your mother was involved, Lian."

Lian lifted her hands off the controls. Damian's stomach heaved, and he retched bile into his mouth, spitting the thin, sour liquid onto the bunker's floor.

"And I…hh…I know the...effects of hundreds of distinct poisons, Arsenal. And so I must ask you this."

His breathing ragged and difficult, he still stared straight at her.

"How did you get Cheshire's toxin into my system? When did you poison me? The effects…too rapid for anything longer than…than less than an hour, maybe, I…"

He trailed off, his vision noticeably blurring now. She moved just slightly, turning her head just enough so that he could see her right eye, and the hint of a satisfied smile on her face.

"The jet's water tank," she said softly. "I was hoping you'd be feeling vulnerable enough to want to wash the blood off your face." She paused, then let out a little muted chuckle, and turned fully around to face him, leaned back against the controls of the computer, took hold of the gun at her hip, held it up, balancing the weapon in her grip. "The concentration was fairly low. I expected it to weaken you, maybe, if any of the poison got into an exposed wound." The chuckle, this time, was more like a giggle, high and girlish, and as she laughed she covered her open mouth with her free hand. "But you drank it, didn't you? You must have. It's working too beautifully. This is all too easy, Damian, you have to understand. This has all been too easy."

A pause. And then she said, "It's been a pleasure, Robin," and she pointed the gun and a resounding BLAM echoed in the darkness and then there was silence.