Till All Souls (3/3)
a Justice League story
by Merlin Missy
Copyright 2004
PG-13
Morning. Sunday morning. That means there will be a paper in the
hallway when she opens the door. John is snoring beside her. He came in
late from duty at the new Watchtower, grumbling about raw recruits. Shayera
nodded and asked him if he had eaten and they went to sleep and this is her
life.
She used to have another one. She remembers it when she tries very hard.
Alone in the apartment, there's little to do but sit and try to remember.
She remembers that she heals very fast. It's a trait of her people. She is
beginning to understand that this is why she remembers things. She's not
sure she wants to piece together these carved up memories, because she
remembers blood and people screaming and she remembers that she was
the cause of it all but these things are distant, like a dream.
For three days, she's been palming the medication John gives her. She
remembers a lot more without the pills and the memories let her know she
used to be able to think and feel and this is painful.
It's hard to move out of the bed, and it takes her three tries before she can
stumble her feet into slippers and stand. He is still asleep. She watches
him, and she remembers him, too. She knows he loves her, or at least he
loves his memory of who she used to be. He has been kind to her. He
doesn't yell at her when she does things wrong like pile all the dishes in
the house into the small drainer, where they tip and fall to the floor and
break. He holds her hand sometimes when they sit on the couch together
and that's nice. When the baby moves, he puts his hand on her tummy.
The part of her that used to be someone else is sad because she knows he
will be hurt, but the part of her that she considers to be herself knows that
a prison is a prison, whether it's a hospital or an apartment or her own
head.
And she cannot stand confinement.
It's cold outside in the early Sunday morning autumn air, but the sun is
warm on her wings. The few people on the street — early church services,
says her memory — stare at her and shy away but she ignores them as she
watches the traffic. There isn't a light at this corner, and the stop sign only
pauses traffic on the cross street, so cars hurry past over the speed limit.
The delivery truck is big and orange and is going too fast, and she
smiles.
Shayera woke. She was still on the floor wrapped in her blanket. She
didn't know how long she'd been out. She remembered hearing voices for
a while after her escape attempt, and then she'd fallen asleep. The alert
hadn't been enough to call them all out, apparently.
There was a tray in front of the cage. She pulled it towards her, stared at
the food for a few minutes, then pushed it away again.
"Eat." John came into view. He was still angry, she could see it all over
his face.
"You're going to kill me. Why bother?"
"We haven't decided what we're doing with you yet."
"True. You may just decide to lobotomize me. That would be so
much better."
"You don't. Understand. Anything." He walked away.
"Wait!" she called. He stopped, looked back. "Please don't go. I'm
sorry."
"I don't think you're ever going to be sorry enough."
"I'm sorry she hurt you. I'm sorry you had to hurt her." Grundy's death
was too fresh in her mind and she spared a moment for grief.
"It had to be done," he said, but hollowly.
"She would have understood that."
"No. She didn't." She read the pain in his eyes, and she knew her double
was dead, and she was glad despite all else. Small mercies were
sometimes the only ones they had.
"Look, whatever she did to you, whatever she took from you ... "
John's face froze. "You don't know what she took from me."
He left the tray, but she didn't see him again for hours.
"So," Vixen said from behind him. "You gonna tell me what's going on?"
John continued his work. The electronics for this thing were delicate.
"What do you mean?"
"No one's seen Hawkgirl in three days." Four, he thought but
didn't say. It's been four days. "But there's no search on. There's
no criminal asking for ransom. And the six of you are clucking around
like hens and working on something. Share."
"I can't." A tiny drop of solder fused one wire to another. The sizzle
almost hid her sigh. He set his tools down. "Come here." She glared.
"Please, Mari?"
Not entirely appeased, she approached him.
As low as he dared speak, he said, "It's possible that exact doubles of me
and the other original league members are trying to infiltrate the group."
"You think it's the government making clones again?"
"No. Did you ever read the report on the Justice Lords?" Her eyes went
wide. "We really don't want it wide-spread that we might not be us."
"How sure are you that it's them?"
"Pretty sure."
"What about Hawkgirl?"
They have her and I don't know what they're doing to her. "We
don't know."
She chewed her lip. "What can I do to help?" He smiled inside; this was
one of the many reasons why he liked her.
"Do you know how to wire a circuit board for cross-dimensional travel?"
She sat down beside him. "Not yet."
Diana bound her hands with the lasso the next time she escorted Shayera
to the restroom, untying her only after they were both inside. "Don't think
I'm enjoying this any more than you are," she said. "The only reason
we're letting you out at all is that no one wants to clean a damned bucket."
Not eating or drinking wasn't going to work, either. In case she possibly
could have forgotten, Superman reminded her anyone among them could
break all her teeth and force a tube down her throat. They wanted her alive
for the time being.
She wished she could think of that as a positive thing.
She was out of codes and cyphers. From her cage, she translated the
messages as they were played for her, but Batman followed these up with
comments like: "That's the wrong verb tense for that noun sequence."
While she wasn't entirely sure she understood what he meant, she knew
he was right.
She had better luck translating the Gordanian transmissions. He hadn't yet
grasped the language structure or the tonal discordances that made the
difference between numbers, so while she could give them rough
estimations of what was being said — over the unencrypted channels
anyway — she was still of some value.
They allowed her paper and pencil and a playback device within reach but
outside the bars. Decrypting by hand was painstaking and was not her
field. Despite this, she'd discovered a new encryption key within about
six hours of work. A backlog of messages cleared with the new key, and
she greedily translated them all before Batman had a go.
As a reward, she was permitted another shower and a fresh change of
clothes. For all that they belonged to a dead woman, these were of a
higher quality than those she'd been given before.
"The other me had good taste," she remarked to Diana as she dressed, her
flesh crawling just a little at the touch of the fabric.
The other woman shrugged. "John brought the rest of her clothes to the
Cave. I chose the outfit. You look good in dark colors."
"You think?"
Diana nodded. "Brings out your complexion. I like it. We'll probably
bury you in it."
Batman did all the Thanagarian translations for the rest of the day. She
managed two more uncoded Gordanian messages, but the rest were
beyond her.
As the day waned, the others started talking in low voices where she could
not see them. When Diana came to escort her out for the last time before
they shut down for the night, she almost didn't go. As they walked to and
from the maddingly normal bathroom in the heart of the shrine Batman
had built to his own grief, Shayera expected every second for a chop to the
back of her neck that never came.
After they left her, she sat awake in the tiny cage, listening to the rustle of
the bats as they came and went. Each squeak was another cold speck of
sand through the hourglass of her life.
The camera hummed at the edge of inaudibility. After, would they
rewatch the tape of her last night alone, huddled under a thin blanket in the
dark? Would they kill her here and send a copy of the tape through the
portal so her friends knew to stop looking?
The cage was small and cold and it was the last place she was ever going
to see, these clothes that weren't hers and this stupid blanket the last things
she would ever touch. No mask. No weapon. No hope of rescue. No
faith in a world beyond.
Shayera had nothing left but herself.
And then she understood.
John came early, and alone. She knew she was going to die because he'd
brought her pancakes with honey for breakfast.
"Tell me what she took from you."
"It doesn't matter now."
"Does to me. Especially if I'm getting punished for it."
"You're being punished for what you did."
She held onto one bar. "John, I know what I did. I know why I did it. I
thought I was doing it for the right reasons, and it turns out that good
intentions really do make great asphalt."
"You betrayed us!"
"No," she said, and her voice shook. "Let's get one thing clear.
She betrayed you. She spied on you, told your secrets. Broke your
heart." Anyone else would have seen him stand statue-still. She who
knew his double so well could see the line of him shake. "I know. I
betrayed my friends, my adopted home and the man I loved. I did these
things too.
"But not to you."
"There's no difference," he said.
"There is. I'm not her, John. I'm me. I've got hundreds if not thousands
of big and small things to atone for in my universe. I'm tired of trying to
make up for hers too. Some things are not my responsibility."
"Maybe they should be."
"They shouldn't. I need to go home. I need to make things right with my
friends. With my John. And maybe I never will." It hurt to think that last
part, to know that no matter what she did it might never be nearly enough,
but it hurt worse to think she'd never even have the chance. "Let me try."
"People died!"
"Not in my universe."
"You're lying."
"I'm not. You don't think I scoured every news source I could find
afterwards? I wanted to know how much blood I had on my hands."
There had been incidental deaths: heart attacks, traffic accidents. Her
heart ached at these and knew there had been nothing she could have done
differently to prevent them. Worse were the deaths of her people in the
war, deaths now almost surely guaranteed. "I didn't kill anyone on my
Earth. Not during the invasion," she amended, remembering Grundy's
tired, bowed head in the dark sewer. "And I haven't done anything at all
in yours. The last time I was here, I was unconscious the whole time if
you'll recall."
"I remember." She'd bashed the wall open and he'd been standing there
and he'd slammed into her with a blinding green bolt and she'd almost
died.
"We all have things to make up for. Give me a chance to fix mine."
"And if you're lying again? If all you're doing is biding your time until
the fleet comes back? I can't take that chance." But he was wavering.
"You won't. You made that call already. You made it so your Shayera
would never betray you again. My friends get to make the same choice.
Not. You." The blow struck home, at last; it was all over his face. His
Shayera was dead and buried and lost, and he couldn't force himself to
bury her again.
She swallowed.
"I'll make you a deal. You guys use the gate to watch us sometimes,
right?" And if that's not creepy I don't know what is. "Well, if I
ever go against my friends, if I ever stray, you can send Diana through
after me."
"Not Superman?"
"If nothing else, I've earned a quick death."
He approached the cage. She had to tip her head up just a bit to see his
face. Different universes, but he and her John were as close as twins in
their features and expressions. Closer. There was so much she wanted to
say, but this wasn't the John she wanted to say it to.
"I could give you a quick death right now."
"If I screw up again, you have my permission."
His mouth quirked. "I wasn't asking."
"I mean it. If I do something — anything — to betray the trust of
my friends in my world, I won't fight Diana when she comes. Or you."
Of course if that ever happens, you'll have to stand in line.
"You didn't let your Shayera have a chance to make amends, and you can't
undo what you did to her any more than I can undo my mistakes. All we
can do, all anybody ever gets to do, is move on and try to do better next
time."
He stared. "You sounded just like her, right then."
He bent down to brush the lightest kiss possible against her mouth. He
wasn't her John but it was all right because she wasn't his Shayera, and
she closed her eyes to pretend it was otherwise. Then he pulled back and
threw his ring arm out. An emerald beam shot out the camera watching
her cell.
"That got broken in your escape," he told her as he unlocked the cage.
"The tape accidentally got deleted too."
"Whoops," she said.
"I'll be watching you." I'll bet. He touched her cheek. She
thought maybe he was going to kiss her again, but instead he turned to the
portal controls. So much pain in him, in his shoulders and his eyes.
Maybe there were things she could still fix here.
"Um. In our universe, we've opened up membership to other
superheroes."
"We've done the same thing. That's why we've had time to spend
watching you."
"Is one of the new people named Vixen?" He nodded. "In our universe,
she's ... You should talk to her."
"I'll think about it."
Shayera walked out of the portal into the snow. As her feet hit the
sidewalk, she braced herself, but it looked as though she'd get through this
particular return trip without a concussion.
Change had to start somewhere.
She touched her ear. "Hawkgirl to Watchtower. J'onn, are you there?"
"Watchtower here. Where are you?" Concern and relief flooded his
voice.
"Back," she said. "I think. Where's Flash?"
"Right here," he piped up on the same channel. She grinned. "You got
Lord troubles?"
"Not anymore. Send someone to pick me up and I'll tell you all about it."
"Done," said a third voice. It was John, her John, and maybe all
they'd have from now on were arguments, but maybe not. She was going
to have to prove that she was herself when he arrived; she was pretty sure
she knew enough embarrassing stories to bear witness to her identity.
Armed with the proper stories, she might even convince him to take the
long way back.
Snow began to fall again, but she wasn't cold anymore.
The End
Note: I didn't intend to write a sequel to "To Every Woman a Happy
Ending." It just kind of happened. (I also noticed that there are certain
thematic similarities to "Shadow Chaser." Um. Happens. Great stories
plant a seed in your head, and all that.)