Epilogue: Ghosts of ourselves

"Lock the door. In the dark journey of our night,
two childhood stands in the corner of the bedroom
watching the way we take each other to bits
to stare at our heart. I hear a story
told in sleep in a lost accent. You know the words.

[…]

Put out the light. Years stand outside on the street
looking up to an open window, black as our mouth
which utters its tuneless song. The ghosts of ourselves,
behind and before us, throng in a mirror, blind,
laughing and weeping. They know who we are."
-Carol Ann Duffy, from "Close"

She flipped a switch, and the lights in the Tower flickered slightly, methodically turning on, one by one.

"So," she said. "I guess this is it."

Milagro watched the empty, silent rooms warily. She could see so clearly them all sitting there, laughing – playing a game – being lectured by their families. There was a stinging pain in her chest and a tugging in her belly.

"I thought there'd be more than just us," said Chris quietly. Milagro glanced at him.

"I'm not sure you can blame them," she sighed. "Iris can't leave her family. And they're right, Maxy needs more training before she gets back. She's young. We all knew that."

She stepped forward, trailed her fingers along the couch she had so often draped herself across, laughing at the others.

"Sin might be back. Black Canary said it wasn't for long, right? But you know what Lian always said about Sin being here, that she didn't fit in all that well. I think she's just gonna take some time to get back on track, and heal. She's still pretty beat up."

"Milly," said Chris. She turned around to look at him. He was leaning against the wall beside the door, his arms folded across his chest, his brow knotted in something like grief and exhaustion.

"Yes?" she answered, her voice tinkling and made of glass.

"You're not coming back, are you?"

She watched him. Then, slowly, she said, "No. Not unless we have another Lantern here to babysit me."

"They said that?"

She nodded. "The ring's still mine," she said. "But I don't get to use it without authorization."

Chris said nothing. "That's a joke," he said.

"I know," she replied.

They didn't move. And then he asked, "You think Lian's ever coming back?"

"Not anytime soon. Not until she finds her mother, I bet. And tears her apart."

Chris nodded. He unfolded his arms, rubbed his hands across his thighs, his eyes darting around the room. "I can't," he said, not looking at her, "keep this up on my own."

"That's okay," she said. "You don't have to."

"Someone should."

"Someone else can."

"I want to. I don't – I can't do it by myself."

"That's okay," Milagro repeated. They didn't say anything, just stood there in the artificially lit Tower, alone and deep and quiet. She looked at him. "Chris," she said. "You have as much right as any of them not to be here. What I – what I did to you…" she broke off, ashamed.

He didn't look up at her, only blinked. "It's funny," he said, with no humor in his voice. "You start to think you can't feel pain anymore. And then…"

She closed her eyes, turning away.

Chris swallowed his words, and then he said, "Did you know Damian left?"

Milagro looked back at him, and there was no accusation, no fear in his eyes. "What do you mean?"

"I heard they left the country," Chris answered. "I don't know where they went. I thought about finding him and getting him to come back for this, but I don't think he would."

"Good riddance," sniffed Milagro. "He was obnoxious, and he was a bully."

They were silent.

Chris said, quietly, "He really, really cared about us."

"Yeah, well. He could've shown it more."

"I don't think he knew how to," said Chris. "I think that's what Iris was always trying to teach him."

"Iris didn't have to teach him anything," said Milagro harshly. "She's just a kid, she doesn't know anything better than any of us ever did. And now her family's falling apart and she's falling apart and there is no more team and it's his-"

She stopped herself. Chris looked at her with pure, crystalline eyes. "His fault?" he asked, his voice a breath, soft but kind.

She looked away. "This is nobody's fault, and I know that," she said. "But not having anybody to blame makes it much harder to take in."

"Milagro," said Chris. She looked up, and he went to her, gently put strong arms around her. "You should probably go home," he said, burying his face in her shoulder, her long, coarse hair. "I don't think anyone likes knowing you and I are here alone."

She returned the embrace, holding him tightly. "This is it," she said. "This is all we get to be."

"We'll see." They broke apart. "You need a ride home?" he asked her. She smiled at him slyly.

"If you're offering," she answered, and he returned the smile and scooped her into his arms, and carried her out into the darkening sky.

Far away, in a cave underneath Wayne Manor, a man held a small phone up to his ear.

"Hi, Wally," he breathed. "It's Dick. I just… I wanted to let you know that I'm worried about you, man. I hope Jai's doing better. Heard the League misses you. If you ever…if you need somebody. I'm here."

Dick took the phone away from his ear and ended the call. The Batcave was silent and dark. He didn't move for a moment, and then he dialed another number, pressed the phone to his head again. This time, with a gentle click, someone answered.

"Harper household."

"Roy."

A little breath, like a sigh. "I didn't know you were still around. Thought you guys were leaving."

"Bruce took Damian, that's all. I'm still here."

"You in touch with them?"

"Not unless it's an emergency."

Roy hesitated, then he said, "I really need him to talk to her."

"Damian?"

"Yeah. Someone to get her up back on her feet."

"She's not listening to you?"

"You know her. She never listened to me."

"Damian won't help. He won't talk at all. Get Iris."

"Wally's not speaking to me."

Dick let out a breath of disappointment. "Yeah," he said. "Me neither."

Neither of them said anything.

"You know anything new about Jai?" asked Dick.

"We'd have heard if he woke up."

Dick was silent, and then he said, "I don't think he's going to. Bruce got the hospital records. He's on life support. Completely unresponsive."

Roy swore, and it rang between them in the silence. "I want to kill her, for this," he said, and his voice was low. "I know she's done things I should be far angrier about, but I want to kill her for this."

"We're all looking for her."

Silence. Then Roy said, "I think Lian knows something. But she won't tell me. I don't know if it's because she feels so guilty, or because she – because she's trying to protect her mother, or…"

"If anyone finds anything," said Dick, "I will get it sent straight to you."

There was a pause.

Dick said, "The League hasn't gone public with the adjustments yet."

"The League has never been public."

"People are going to start noticing that Blue Beetle, the Flash, Superman, and you aren't working with them anymore."

"What do you want me to say? Lian needs me here."

"I would think she can't stand you right now."

Neither of them said anything, and then Roy let out a loud sigh. "Dick," he said. "Thanks for calling. But there really isn't anything I can do for you right now."

"I'm not asking you to-"

"Dick," interrupted Roy. "Thank you."

Nothing. Click.

Dick lowered the phone

It was a cold and misty morning, a dense rain falling across the grassy moors, the craggy cliffs. The car slid silently through the dampness, cutting sharp slits through pastures and fields, heading to somewhere remote and quiet.

The older man drove wordlessly, the windshield wipers occasionally flitting across his line of vision, sweeping the drizzly rain from the glass before him. In the seat beside him, a boy with dark hair curling at the ends and eyes just as dark as his father's pressed his elbow against the window, resting his hand at his lips, covering his mouth. He stared through the window, watching the green light skim past them.

They came to a cliff near the ocean, a secret entrance to a long-abandoned headquarters buried underneath the thick, fertile soil. The car rolled on to the greenery, scaring a few sheep away, and then stopped and they both sat there in silence, listening to the rain pattering the roof of the car and the gentle tink-tink-tink of the engine cooling.

Damian said, "I don't want you to go with me."

Bruce peered out into the cold morning, and then shifted his gaze to look at his son heavily. "I won't," he said. "If you don't want."

For a long moment, Damian said nothing, staring out past the window and the rain and the moisture. Then he opened the car door with a creak, and got out. He hovered for a moment, door open, standing in the icy precipitation, then slammed the door of his father's car shut again and shoved his hands aggressively into his pockets, setting off across the heath. Bruce sat in the car, alone.

Damian had been to this place many times, and it occupied so much of his memory before his time as Robin that it seemed to be wholly what little he had left of his mother: the warmth of her gloved hand holding his, carrying him like a child, or the sound of her voice drowning in the rain, echoing in the steel beneath the land. There was an old entrance that had been blown open and never repaired, no doubt in the last furious frenzy to empty the place, dispose of the evidence, desert him forever. There was no pain in his heart, but only an empty, vacant sort of pulse, something not strong enough to push his blood, poison, congealed mud, through his veins.

He entered the place as one would enter a church, bowing to the gargoyles which no longer watched, security cameras with their lenses crushed. There was a reverence for him as this was surely the place, if not of his birth, then of his development, of his creation, of what turned him into what he became. He spent many years underground in England, underneath the great city of London itself and away, here, in the midst of the purest, simplest form of nature. Damian had an immense respect for a great many things, and some of those things were the power of the rain turning solid earth into mud, and the walls of steel carved into pure rock, and love.

He traced through the place slowly, remembering every entrance and exit, every return and every surrender. He remembered his teachers and his adversaries and his mother. He remembered doctors, and a team of surgeons, and monstrosities the likes of which a child should not see, but which he saw, and which only strengthened him. There was only strength in these walls. Damian allowed himself to touch the harsh, unloving metal.

There was a room, heavy metal door swung shut, even in the poor order to which the base had fallen. He took it and held it in his strong hands and pulled it open, unsettling dust and red rust around the doorframe.

He peered into the room. There was no light, not even a dull red heating lamp; he pulled a flashlight from his pocket and turned it on, shone it in.

The room was smaller than he remembered, full of every single instrument and mechanical device he remembered, identical except for the dirt and the dust, and the fact that the giant glass orb meant to hold a fetus or an unconscious child was broken, the top half shattered into pieces, completely unfixable.

Damian reached out and pressed his hand against the glass.

He did not remember being confined to this orb. He could barely recall a time when he had been small enough to fit. After he outgrew this small feeding tank, he was removed to a bio-tube when necessary, and he could remember that, remember fading, not of his own will, into darkness. He could remember coming into consciousness again, his body suddenly acutely aware, and a warm, wet feeling invading every inch of his skin, sickening, suffocating, stinging the inside of his nose while his back, along his spine, burned as the disinfecting fluid touched his raw wounds. He could remember being unable to inhale, a pain in his eyes, fingernails and toenails soft, like they could slide right off his skin. He could remember his hair feeling unconnected to his scalp, and a weightlessness in his body, and his insides clenching within his liquid world, the oversized test tube of his entire universe.

Damian reached into the broken orb, pointing his flashlight into it. His fingers sloshed through a layer of liquid at the body, viscous and wet, but there was no carcass there. It made him sick, but it also filled him with an unanticipated rush of forgiveness for his mother, that she would not leave a thing there for him to touch, touch with his fingers that she molded so perfectly back when he drifted patiently in his viscous, wet world.

Damian stood there in the place of his birth, the flashlight pointing at the floor, and he pressed the hand anointed with the liquid at the bottom of the glass orb to his eyes, holding back everything before it could become. Memories of his infanthood made him vulnerable, but he was prepared, and there was no one there to see.

It wasn't more than an hour later that Damian returned, exiting his old steel home, watching his breath condense and materialize in the cold daytime air. The rain had stopped. From across the grass, he could see the car, and his father standing beside it.

He approached it with caution, stopping a few yards away, regarding his father with something odd on his face.

Bruce asked, "Are you all right?"

Damian considered this for a long time, watching his father. Then he glanced at the car behind, then up at the dull, gray sky, then back to where he had entered the compound inside of which he had come to be.

He turned back to his father and he said, quietly, "Let's go home," and then headed around the car, opened a door, and slid into the passenger's seat. His father did not hesitate, but entered the car and turned the ignition, and they drove away from the underground fortress, pulsing underneath their feet.

In a bedroom a continent away, the night still an inky black outside, a girl lay alone in her bed, surrounded by pink sheets and stuffed animals, and couldn't sleep. The silence was deafening and heavy – and then abruptly broken by the sounds of footsteps, light on the carpet inside the very room. Lian, in bed, did not close her eyes.

"Please," she said, tiredly, "tell me you're here to kill me."

A voice from the shadows. "No," said Iris, her bright hair colorless in the dark room. "I'm not."

There was a silence. Lian set herself up on her elbows, then, reluctantly, sat up. "I thought you'd never come," she said, her voice barely more than a whisper. "I thought after what I did…"

"That wasn't you."

"Yes," said Lian. "It was."

The silence was cold. Iris walked to her bed, sat down on the edge. "I have known you," said Iris, "since I was born. You've been my best friend for almost as long. Give yourself some credit. I know there's no way you'd ever hurt me like that."

Lian didn't move. She couldn't see Iris in the darkness, but she could feel her body, the dip in the bed where she sat. "I'm too easily taken advantage of, Iris," said Lian, reaching out with one hand to brush against Iris's arm. "Too easy to manipulate, to handle, to control. Everybody says that Damian is the one with the darkness inside of him, but you don't know how angry I get sometimes, Irey. You don't know what I'm capable of."

"Yes, I do," said Iris. "I told you, Lian. You've been my best friend for years. I know everything about you, even things your dad can't tell about you."

Lian stared at the dark outline of Iris's face. "I wish you understood," she said, "how much I don't deserve this."

Bluntly, Iris said, "My brother is everything but dead. If anyone is clear on what and how you deserve anything, it's me."

"I want you to leave me alone," said Lian, closing her eyes, bowing her head slightly so she couldn't even imagine she was looking at Iris's face. "I want you to leave me alone, or I want you to kill-"

In the depth of Lian's dark bedroom, warm and soft, sunken into the bed where they sat, burning hands touched Lian's shoulders gently, and lips touched against hers. A roaring, inconsolable silence crashed over her, suddenly hyper-alert, pulse pounding, belly roiling, every nerve in her body screaming alarm bells, and-

Iris broke away from the kiss, her mouth close enough to breathe into Lian's.

Neither of them said anything. Their noses touching, Lian whispered, "Damian-"

"He knows," replied Iris, just as quietly, "that I love him, and I do, Lian, of course I do. You know me, and you know that." She was silent. "But he's broken, after this. He thinks he doesn't have anything left to give. So he's given me this."

Lian stared at Iris's formless shape in the darkness. "I don't get to be given away," she breathed.

"I know," said Iris, and she kissed her again.

"Especially not by Damian."

"I know," said Iris, lips on the corner of Lian's mouth.

"I love you," said Lian breathlessly. "A lot. I have for, like, years now."

Iris's lips curved into a smile on Lian's skin. "If anyone," she whispered, "knows what it is you deserve," she put her arms around Lian, holding her tightly, "it's me."

There was a silence.

Then Lian pulled away and said, "Iris."

Iris held onto her hands, but mirrored her movement. "Lian."

"Come with me."

"To where?"

"I don't know," whispered Lian. "But I'm not staying here, and I'm not waiting for anyone to find my mother for me. I know who's responsible and I know a hell of a lot more than any of they do. I can't eat and I can't sleep and I'm not even going to be able to look you in the eye tomorrow because of what I did. Come with me. Let's find her."

"Where do we start?"

Lian didn't answer immediately. She considered this for a long time, holding Iris's hands in her own, the gentle touch of another hot mouth still lingering about her lips. She felt a burning low in her belly, the anger-turned-darkness that everyone said Damian had inside of him, but which she had felt so vividly and strongly that it had torn her apart. She thought of Damian's hands, strong and soft and so often bruised, and she thought of a team broken up and beaten down and divided into pieces.

"Where do we start?" repeated Iris's voice inside of her, eager and terrifyingly ready, and the answer filled her up like someone breathing oxygen into her lungs, expanding and rising inside of her, through her navel and belly and throat and bubbling into her mouth, uncontrollable and filled with lusty promise, and she clung tightly to Iris's hands and she opened her mouth.

She asked, under her breath in the dead of the night-

"…How far can you take us?"